Evaluation of Nursing in the Community

The process through which a nurse assesses the value, or the final outcome of nursing care provided is known as evaluation. The community (society/group) or a public health nurse, like any other sort of nurse, wants to know how well-set goals were met and what unexpected outcomes occurred. The evaluation’s goal is to make it easier to make more decisions. An evaluation can find that what was done could not have been done better, that the objectives were met, and that the objectives were equally satisfactory to the nurse and the community
members. This conclusion would be reason to rejoice. Another evaluation may reveal that changes to the strategy of the care are required to achieve the targeted results more successfully; or that, while goals were met, the cost in terms of money, time, or other resources was too high for the nurse or members of the care given community.

The evaluation of nursing in the Community is founded on three expectations: first, that nursing activities have consequences, both intentional (done on purpose as planned) and unintentional; the second one is that nurses are responsible for their activities or actions the take and the care they deliver; and the third one is that different sets of activities or actions taken by a nurse result in varied resource allocations (i.e., some nursing interventions may use more resources than others in similar situations). There are two parts to evaluation: measurement and interpretation. There are numerous schemes (systems) or representations or models for arranging ideas regarding evaluation, which might lead to misunderstanding among persons who use different nomenclature for equivalent concepts.

The idea of monitoring whether intended goals were met is, nonetheless, fundamental to the nursing process. This action and its outcome or the consequences are also known as outcome attainment, performance evaluation, effort results, and effectiveness evaluation. “Were the planned goals achieved?” the nurse tries to answer. Another fundamental concept is the quality of the products and the processes that led to them. The following are some terms used to describe this concept:

• Appropriate/Fitting — ideal for a certain moment or application
• Adequate/Satisfactory — capable of meeting a need; adequate or suitable
• Effective/Operative — delivering a desired outcome; constructive

Each of these words refers to a distinct component of quality measurement. The following are some quality related questions to consider. How did the interventions work, and why did they work? Was the behavior of the nurse’s moral? Did the nurses focus on the most critical objectives? Were resources utilized effectively? How many needs and objectives were the plan able to meet?. Depending on the size and complexity of the community, as well as whether the community is geopolitical or phenomenological, public health nurses’ duties for assessing nursing care with communities differ. When is community nursing care evaluated? Summative evaluation is the process of evaluating the effectiveness or the efficiency of care after interferences have been completed. The nurse is looking at and investigate the total, the bottom line, the final outcome. Summative evaluation is assessing how the community reacts to nursing care and interpreting how well the goals were met. Measurement of outcomes and target attainment are frequently part of summative evaluation. Summative review might happen for long period of time such as several months or even years after providing the nursing care. The goal of these assessments is to evaluate if there was any long-standing impact on the community’s well-being and health responses. Formative evaluation happens through the nursing procedure but before the evaluation of the care outcomes or the consequences. This assessment takes place both during the development of nursing care and throughout its delivery. In other words, formative evaluation looks at how nursing care is delivered daily. Nursing practices can be modified over time via formative evaluation.

Because the evaluation includes community affiliations, at least some of it must take place in the clients’ neighborhood. Mutuality (sympathy) is a crucial component in evaluation. Because the public health nurse’s (community’s) influence is mostly determined by community members’ self- care and day-to-day activity changes, the nurse must note down and confirm the outcomes directly with them. Furthermore, even if objectives were met, some unfavorable or unanticipated outcomes may have happened. To uncover and validate the meaning of the experience, the nurse must investigate community members’ perspectives. It’s crucial to figure out how satisfied or pleased community people are with the outcomes/results and nurse interferences. Individuals who have expectations about nursing care but are not actively involved in its final outcome are referred to as stakeholders. Individuals who needed approval, people who donated money or supplies, people who offer their help without being paid, and those (such as rivals) who were affected by the presence of nursing services are just a few examples.

The region health officer, a retail pharmacy who gives syringes, a local pediatrician worried about economic struggle, and parents of people who have been inoculated are all possible stakeholders in a community immunization campaign. Planning, data collecting, analysis and interpretation of them, formulation of recommendations using those data, reporting of results, and execution of recommendations are all steps in the evaluation process. The results of nursing interventions are evaluated by outcome attainment, often known as effectiveness. Changes in the direction of predetermined aims, as well as unintended consequences, may have occurred.

Large health programs are frequently evaluated as a whole, with no distinction made between the impacts of nursing treatments and the effects of other health professions and program components. As a result, rather of being assessed as a distinct intervention, nursing care might be included in a single evaluation for the entire program. It is more advantageous to develop evaluation procedures and standards for each section of a program since evaluators will know which strategies are effective and which may need to be updated or deleted.

Nurse-sensitive outcomes can then be determined by evaluators. Knowing which nurse interference is contributing to which outcome(result) is more supportive in multiple community/public health nursing programs. The assessment of outcome attainment looks at fluctuate in the population, the community’s wellbeing care system, and the atmosphere. Knowledge, behavior, and abilities, as well as attitudes, emotional well-being, and health state, can all change. More than the population’s results must be considered when assessing a community’s health. Changes or variations such as the provision of health facilities, the gratification and accepting such programs and the existence of policies must all be examined because the communication of people in their surroundings supports or inhibits health. Each of these factors, which are working as an final outcome or result measure of population or community health, is examined in further depth. Each of these factors can be used to assess the efficacy of different community/public health nursing treatments.

In conclusion, the goal of evaluation of nursing in the community is to determine the effectiveness of nursing treatments by looking at projected outcomes to see if they were met within the time frames set. Nurses use critical thinking to analyse reassessment data and decide if a patient’s predicted results were met, partially met, or not met within the time frames set during the evaluation phase. If the outcomes are not attained, or are only partially accomplished, within the time frame indicated, the treatment plan should be changed. Reassessment should occur every time the nurse interacts with a patient, discusses the treatment plan with other members of the inter-professional team, or examines new laboratory or diagnostic test results. Nursing care plans should be updated when new priorities emerge. The evaluation’s findings should be recorded in the patient’s medical record.