Caring Model
At Aspirus Wausau Hospital, nursing staff’s top priority is to create and sustain an environment of caring. Created by Wausau Hospital nurses in 1995, the Caring Model of Professional Nursing Practice defines the expectations for professional nursing performance and provides nurses with a context and structure for serving patients, families, and the community.
This model is evidence-based, being grounded in an amalgam of nursing theories. Theorists such as Jean Watson, Carol Hernandez, and nurse researchers like Deloris Gaut were great influences in the development of the Caring Model. All of these theorists declared that caring is the essence of nursing, and this concept has become the basis for professional nursing practice at Aspirus Wausau Hospital.
These concepts form the character of Aspirus Wausau Hospital Nursing and govern every interaction with patients and peers. Through the Caring Model, nurses merge research, knowledge, technology, and skill to meet the unique needs of each patient.
Eight components of The Caring Model:
Competence
The skills and knowledge required to deliver or assist in the delivery of quality patient care. Nurses are personally responsible to continually expand skills and knowledge to enhance clinical outcomes.
Accountability
Accepting ownership for all actions, decisions and outcomes. Each nurse is ultimately accountable for the delivery of quality health care.
Responsibility
A charge to do something for which one is accountable to someone. Professional nursing requires each practitioner to accept ownership of his or her practice.
Empowerment
The personal authority to make decisions and act upon them. Health services are enhanced when both the nurse and the patient are empowered.
Confidence
Each nurse’s belief in his/her own ability to perform the responsibilities of their job. When the nurse acts with confidence, the relationship between patient and caregiver is strengthened and outcomes are enhanced.
Advocacy
The act of speaking in support of someone else.
Relationship
The connections between and among people. Building an empathetic relationship with a patient and their family is the key that unlocks the uniqueness of the patient and enhances the value of therapeutic interventions in achieving optimal patient outcomes.
Enabling
Providing the means for someone to be able to do something. In Professional Nursing Practice, it involves the effective and efficient transmission and flow of information and ideas to facilitate adjustments in one’s self, one’s performance and one’s outcomes.