Help needed guys..

allnurses Guide · May 24, 2008

Hi there Sarah, welcome to the site.

nightmare, RN · May 24, 2008

Post moved to Canadian forum for more informed input.

Pediatric Critical Care Columnist · May 24, 2008

Can anyone help me and tell me what models of nursing are used in the majority of canadian hospitals? Also, on how canadian nursing differentiates UK nursing? Or any help at all!
It will be much appreciated.

First, welcome to our forum. We're usually a pretty nice bunch here and are always willing to help out.

Now, your questions aren't quite so straight-forward. The models of nursing used vary from province to province, hospital to hospital and unit to unit. Most hospitals practice family centred care, but that is interpreted differently by the individual units. I've worked in units that emphasized primary nursing, where the nurse would have the same group of patients each shift. Where I work now, we have a modified team nursing approach and I rarely have the same assignment two shifts in a row. We have specialty teams who take responsibility for certain subsets of our patient population and we have generalists who provide care to a variety of different sorts of patients. We also have a graduated orientation process whereby the nurse gains experience in basic PICU nursing then receives a two day intermediate orientation. After proving proficiency and assessment skills the third phase, another two day orientation takes place where the nurse learns advanced and complex assessment, therapeutics and some administrative content. Some nurses never attain this level of training. I'm not sure if that is the kind of information you're looking for.

I also can't really answer the question on how Canadian nursing differs from UK nursing very well. Our nursing education differs in the amount of time devoted to nursing specialities; all nurses educated in Canada must have a module on each of medicine, surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics and psychiatry that includes clinical experience before being permitted to write the Canadian Registered Nurse Exam. If your program doesn't provide that, be prepared to be sent back to school. The hierarchy of nursing is defferent here, with a director of nursing at the top of the pyramid, a couple of levels of middle management and then the front-liners. We're building a good practice environment for nurse practitioners and clinical nurse-specialists who have more authority and autonomy. In remote areas, the point of access to health care is often a nurse-practitioner. Many parts of Canada are moving to a primary health model of multidisciplinary care where a person may not need to see a physician if the problem can be addressed by a nurse, a dietician, a physiotherapist or a social worker. This is an exciting development that will allow nurses to finally practice to their full scope.

If you have some more specific questions we can help with, don't hesitate to bring them here. We'll do the best we can...