A hospital nurse is more hands on with the patient, such as; (checking vitals, Inserting IVs’, etc.), as
to a nurse from an insurance organization is more virtual (they speak to you on the phone, and try
to decide if you need to go to the hospital for your illness). A nurse from the hospital is dealing
with patients firsthand, dealing with the sickness of the patients such as; CPR, controlling a patient
who has been shot or stabbed, a patient who is in respiratory distress, etc. The insurance nurse is
just asking questions that their script is asking them to ask, and then they plunk the answers in, in
the system. The nurse plays various roles in pain management such as an assessor, planner,
implemented, educator, advocate, and supporter. In playing these roles, there are some challenges
such as misconceptions, attitudes, gender differences, inadequate knowledge, resource
constraints, lack of culturally appropriate pain assessment tools and fear of addiction and
dependence of patients. The writer has outlined a few recommendations such as re-education of
service providers, developing assessment tools, organizing pain clinics, research in pain
management, etc. (Oware-Gyekye, F. 2008)
There is always someone on the back end of the system- the person who deals with the data
entry. A company I loved working for was fully EMR, and they still had people doing data entry on
the records the doctors and nurses seen for the day. Doctors and nurses don’t understand the
systems sometimes other than the information they are entering, so the back-end people who
work with data entry pull the numbers to make sure everything is correct in the system.
I have been fortunate enough to experience multiple different areas of the medical field. I have
worked on a Neurology Unit, Orthopaedic Unit, Heart Unit, Primary Care and now in the
Occupational Health field. Majority of these were done in a hospital setting but it really showed
me how different it is from each industry and how the technology is used. While in a hospital
setting everything is fast paced and usually that is where critical care is done. In a hospital you
utilize IV monitors, heart monitors, call bells the list could go on and on but in a primary care office
these are things you do not find. As a nurse in a hospital, you could be required to do blood
transfusions, or give controlled medications, this is something a nurse in a primary care would not
do. One common factor is that the all do have an AED and they can easily be accessed in each
facility. So, while a nurse is the same occupation the role is completely different its more intense
and fast paced in a hospital a primary care setting is less invasive and is in my opinion easier than a
hospital setting.
When it comes to management a hospital will have multiple managers for each unit as well as
multiple managers above them. My old unit had 2 managers just for the unit and then a pyramid
of other managers above them. In primary care it is a little different the organizational structure is
different and smaller. There are still the administration duties and managing aspects it is just on a
smaller scale then in a hospital. For instance, you could have only 15 employees in a primary care
facility and that is easier to manage then a hospital unit of over 50 because its day and night shift.
That can make the managing styles different and cause the need for more managers.
I have worked in hospice at two different companies. Even within those two companies,
documentation requirements and systems were different. Just between companies, requirements
are different, there are documents required for compliance and documents that are company
specific.
Our current program we use for documentation or charting is KanTime. KanTime is an integrated
software program that has different care types. The care types are the programs that are made
especially for the specific compliance and business requirements for each sector.
For instance, KanTime has six care types; home care, home health, pediatric, hospice, palliative,
and self-direction (KanTime, 2021). These care types are sectors in which the programming is
specifically organized and created to the compliance and business operations necessary for each
healthcare sector. An example is that Hospice uses a lot of Medicare eligibility. Other healthcare
sectors may use more private insurance methods. Our hospice KanTime allows us to check patient
eligibility within the software Nurses are given specific tasks in hospice, whether it is continuous
care, on call visits, PRN visits, admission to service, or deaths to name a few services that our
nurses provide. Nurses do not necessarily provide in home services for continuous care for daily
pediatric care so the nurses would not need to have that information in the care type for
pediatrics like they would for daily hospice care.
References
KanTime (2021) Hospice Management Suite Retrieved June 15, 2022, from
https://kantime.com/care-type/hospice-management-suite/
Oware-Gyekye F. (2008). Pain management: the role of the nurse. West African Journal of Nursing,
19(1), 50–54.
