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Nursing advocacy for patients is viewed as a vital role for the nursing profession; however, there is little empirical research regarding nursing advocacy.
PROBLEM. The medical-surgical nursing specialty is the largest specialty in acute care settings, but few advocacy studies have focused exclusively on this specialty population.
METHODS. The purpose of this study was to explore the nurse advocacy actions and workplace support for advocacy using written narrative responses to a mailed survey using a medical-surgical nursing sample.
FINDINGS. The responses help to illuminate the importance of the advocate role for this nursing specialty and provide preliminary information on the advocacy actions and workplace support as reported by the nurses.
CONCLUSIONS. The resulting data provide a basis for examining the workplace environmental support for nursing advocacy, further delineate the actions of the nurse advocate, and clarify how nurse advocates follow patient desires regarding care. In addition, the results can be used in education, improving advocacy skills, and safety initiatives.
Search terms: Advocacy, content analysis, nursing
Introduction
Nursing has valued the patient advocate role for many years, and its explicit value has been brought to the forefront of nursing practice since the 1980s (Hanks, 2008a).
Although other health professionals advocate for their patients or clients, nursing has designated the advocate role as a central role of nursing practice. The importance of patient advocacy to nursing is evident not only in the historical philosophical literature of Curtin (1979), Gadow (1980), Kohnke (1982), and Benner (2001), but is additionally cited in educational competencies, practice acts, and ethical codes, such as the American Nurses Association's (ANA, 2001) Code of Ethics for Nursing. The effective use of advocacy can potentially decrease communication errors and provide for increased patient safety (Hanks, 2010).
The nursing literature regarding nursing advocacy for patients is largely philosophical in nature, and there is a lack of a substantive nursing theory regarding nursing advocacy. There has been little empirical research examining nursing advocacy, with the majority of the research being qualitative (Hanks, 2010). Furthermore, there is a lack of medical-surgical specialty samples in the nursing advocacy research literature (Hanks, 2008a) even though national data indicate that the majority (28%) of U.S. inpatient hospital registered nurses are identified as medical-surgical nurses (U.S. Health and Human Services, 2004)....