How useful is the expert practitioner role of the clinical nurse consultant to the generalist community nurse?

Abstract

Objective: The objective was to draw attention to the clinical component of the clinical nurse consultants’ (CNC) role in the community.

Design: Quasi‑experimental research design that used descriptive statistics for data analysis.

Setting: An urban community nursing organisation comprising six community nursing Centres within the northern part of a major Australian city.

Subjects: A self selected sample of nine generalist community nurses (GCN) for a focus group. Information gained from this group informed the development of a questionnaire, which was sent to a convenience sample (n=125) of GCNs. Participation was voluntary and participants were not identified. Seventy‑eight questionnaires were returned within the specified time frame, providing a return rate of 62.4%.

Results: Three main themes emerged:

• enabling the community nurses’ role;


• accessing clinical knowledge\expert practitioner; and


• valuable resource.

The main reasons community nurses accessed CNCs were for clinical knowledge (73%) and problem solving (70%); the majority (82.9%) indicated visiting patient’ homes with the CNCs was most useful.

Conclusion: As the complexity of patients’ needs at home increase, CNCs have taken on an integral clinical role within the organisation. The positive working relationship between the CNCs and GCNs presumably had enhanced patient outcomes and improved patient health status. A significant strength of the survey was the consistent responses in favour of CNCs working in the community with the GCNs. A limitation is that the response rate was small (n=78) and results cannot be generalised. Results of this survey could serve to inform future work force planning.