Patient-focused care on a complex continuing care dialysis unit: Rose's story

Using the standards of patient-focused care and the values of Parse's human becoming school of thought, nurses at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario are exploring new ways to be with patients needing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis on complex continuing care units. For patients such as Rose, health and quality of life are being enhanced through the practice of these methodologies. "I feel cared for." How can health care professionals nurture persons in a manner that makes them feel cared for? On one complex continuing care unit at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, this outlook is one that is threaded through nurses' daily practice. At Sunnybrook and Women's, the philosophy of care revolves around a true value of patient-focused care. Nursing practice based on this philosophy involves being truly present to persons as they move beyond the moment. Nurses are led to view patients as human beings with health needs and not as diagnoses or problems (Saltmarche, Kolodny & Mitchell, 1998). The standards of nursing practice at Sunnybrook and Women's have led the way for nurses and other health care professionals to begin the processes of listening and dialoguing in a new way. The standards for nursing focus on the nurse-person process. This paper will outline the standards of practice at Sunnybrook and Women's, the processes of listening and dialoguing, along with a case example showing how the standards helped one person move through an "uneasy time" relocating from home to a complex continuing care dialysis unit.