Question

ACTIVE LEARNING TEMPLATE Basic Concept: Priority Setting

Basic Concept ACTIVE LEARNING TEMPLATE: STUDENT NAME RÉVIEW MODULE CHAPTER CONCEPT riortty Seminocical Nursing Interventions Related Content Underlying Principles WHO? WHEN? WHY? HOW? (E.G., DELEGATION, LEVELS OF PREVENTION, ADVANCE DIRECTIVES)

Answer 1

Nurses must continuously set and reset priorities in order to meet the needs of multiple clients and to maintain client safety Priority setting requires that decisions be made regarding the order in which: Clients are seen Assessments are completed Intervention are provided Steps in a client procedure are completed Components of client care are completed 1. Prioritize systemic before local ("life before limb"). 2. Prioritize acute before chronic. 3. Prioritize actual problems before potential future problems (ie give meds for acute pain before a client at risk for something).

Prioritize

When evaluating what's on your to-do list, ask yourself:

• What is most critical that only I can deliver?
• What is both urgent and important?
• How am I impeding the progress of other outcomes by not completing this task?
• Where am I the bottleneck to progress?
• What tasks make the most of my unique talents?

• What tasks bring you a lot of joy, but are not your best use of time?
• What are you working on that you believe in, but others don't see its value?
• Where do you see yourself being sucked into the weeds, yet you know your time and energy is best invested elsewhere?

• Delegate

• What tasks are low value?
• What tasks are repetitive and tedious?
• What tasks may be important but are not aligned to your strongest skill set, and can be outsourced to specialists?

The need for a systematic process of priority setting
A set of seven core processes of priority setting, if implemented under an explicit legal and institutional framework, could improve health for any desired level of health spending, while channeling and managing political, commercial, advocacy, and donor interests fairly and ethically.

Why is it necessary to set priorities for medical treatment? After all, such priorities imply that some people will get treatment before others, while others may get no treatment at all Is this really necessary? Why is it not possible to o er everyone the medical assistance they desire? It is one of the fundamental challenges of the health care services that the possibilities and wishes for treatment exceed the available resources to provide it Thus, there is no question of whether we need to set priorities, because there is a prioritisation process taking place whether we choose it or not But we can decide which principles should be applied as a basis for these prioritisation decisions Without such principles in place, priority setting in health care will become more random, patients with identical needs will receive di erent levels of treatment, and it will become more di cult to promote legitimacy for di cult decisions. Hmm