Evaluation of professional nursing practices in a community hospital cancer program: the methodology

In summary, this evaluation plan is designed to assess current oncology nursing practices in a community setting. The focus of the plan is on patient problems identified in the CHCP Cancer Nursing Guidelines and the Hospice Nursing Guidelines. Critical decisions regarding which patient problems to focus on and the implementation of the evaluation plan remain with the CHCP committees. Technical assistance is provided by a CHCP Evaluation Specialist. Finally, summary reports will be generated at regular intervals so as to maximize the impact on current program development. There are several implications for this nursing evaluation plan, both immediate and long range. In the immediate, we hope that the results will help CHCP committees and individual hospitals make informed decisions about future program development. More importantly perhaps, we are for the first time in our local community identifying services central to nursing and developing base line data on the frequency of the delivery of these services. Looking into the future, we see additional implications for these studies. Currently, our evaluation system is a paper system, and paper systems are by their very nature time consuming and somewhat awkward. It is our hope that in the future information about nursing services will be registered on a computerized information system. Then, reports about the types of nursing services and amount of time spend with cancer patients could be automatically generated on a weekly basis, if so desired. However, if we are to attain this goal, we need to systematically identify common patient problems central to oncology nursing care that can be documented and studied.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)