Characterizations of advocacy by practicing nurses

This qualitative descriptive study explored nurses' views of patient advocacy. Seventeen hospital and community nurses were interviewed to determine whether and how they exercise the advocacy role and what they believe promotes or impedes the practice of advocacy. Findings suggested that the advocacy role was not uppermost in the minds of many of the respondents. However, when queried, the nurse-patient relationship emerged as a salient feature of advocacy; teaching, informing, and supporting were frequent activities of nurses in what they described as advocacy; and interpersonal relatedness, rather than issues of accountability and ethics, were central to the advocacy process. Work environment barriers--such as time, economics, acuity, and power hierarchies--combined with factors, such as lack of autonomy and fatigue, to create reasons not to advocate. Physicians contributed to nurses' willingness or unwillingness to advocate depending on their availability, openness to patients and nurses, and their personal demeanor. A conceptual model of client advocacy emerged from the data to guide further explorations of advocacy. The advocacy role is a critical, perhaps unique dimension of professional nursing that is changing rapidly and may be diverging from the usual role prescribed in the professional literature and taught in baccalaureate nursing curricula.