Family Health Team

Optimizing the Role of the Family Practice Registered Nurse

Introduction Professional Expert Communicator Synergist Health Educator Lifelong Learner Glossary of Terms

Working Glossary of Terms

Role - A role describes a broad domain of related competencies.

Competency is a knowledge, skill, judgment, or professional attitude that enables one to effectively perform the activities of a given occupation or function to the standards expected in employment.^{1, 2}

Enabling Competency - For the purposes of our framework, enabling competencies describe the knowledge, skills, judgments, attitudes, and behaviours related to the role identified. Ideally, they should be observable in the context of real application, and help to clarify meaning and educational expectations for the enactment of the Role.

Patient/Client - Where this term is used, it should be taken to mean anyone receiving care.³

Family - This term not only refers to the patient/client’s relatives but anyone within their social network that may be affected by their care.⁴

Patient-centred care – “promotes the active participation of each health care discipline in patient care. It enhances patient and family-centred goals and values, provides mechanisms for continuous communication among caregivers, optimizes staff participation in clinical decision-making within and across disciplines and fosters respect for disciplinary contributions made by all professionals.”^{5, 6}

Team - is a collection of individuals who work interdependently, share responsibility for outcomes, and see themselves and are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems and who manage their relationship across organizational boundaries.^{7, 8}

Collaboration– A process that requires relationships and interactions between health professionals regardless of whether or not they are members of a formalized team or a less formal or virtual group of health professionals working together to provide comprehensive and continuous care to a patient/client. ⁹

Teamwork - Describes an interdependent relationship that exists between members of a team. It is an application of collaboration. “Collaboration” deals with the type of relationships and interactions that take place between coworkers. Effective health care teamwork applies to caregivers who practice collaboration within their work settings. ¹⁰

Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice - Promotes the active participation of each health care discipline in patient care. It enhances patient and family-centred goals and values, provides mechanisms for continuous communication among caregivers, optimizes staff participation in clinical decision-making within and across disciplines and fosters respect for disciplinary contributions made by all professionals.¹¹

Reflective Process: Critical self-evaluation of current and past professional practices leading to personal and professional growth.¹²

Reflective Practice: The use of the reflective process.¹³

Professional nursing practice: a commitment to compassion, caring and strong ethical values; continuous development of self and others; accountability and responsibility for insightful practice; demonstrating a spirit of collaboration and flexibility.¹⁴

Ways of Knowing: Four identified ways of knowing in nursing that came to be known as the epistemology of nursing in the United States (also known as ‘fundamental patterns of knowing’). The four ways of knowing include Empirics, the science of nursing; Ethics, the moral directives of nursing; Personal, the special way nurses have of being with their patients; and Esthetics, the creativity that nurses bring to their practice.¹⁵