Eva's winning ways with people pay off
4 June 2004
Documenting the treatments, medication and incidents when a patient is in care, is a big part of any nurse's job. Kangan Batman Institute of TAFE teachers Gaye Witney and Christine Crofton stress to their students they need to understand the role of writing in their jobs, and do it well.
In fact, they feel documentation is so important and challenging for nurses, Gaye and Christine decided to produce a book to demystify the issue.
Both Gaye and Christine are registered nurses and respected specialists in aged care, as well as teachers at Kangan Batman TAFE.
The book they edited, `Nursing Documentation in Aged Care - a Guide to Practice', was launched on 24 May, at Fred Combridge House, a high care aged care facility in Northcote where many Kangan Batman students do their clinical placement and are familiar faces.
Their publishers, Ausmed Publications, of Melbourne and San Francisco, are distributing the 320 page book in both Australia and the United States because they believe Christine and Gaye have produced something which is a valuable contribution to international best practice in nursing.
"So much of the documentation that nurses have to do is for legal and funding reasons and it is taught to them by consultants as a bureaucratic requirement. Nurses work under huge pressures and we want them to take a step back and look at the issues of documentation from a systems point of view, Gaye said.
"The book will be useful as a textbook because it uses a lot of case studies and scenarios, but its greater audience will be advanced practitioners, who will be able to utilise the practical information in the book in their everyday working lives, when the documentation process is not coming together in a professional way.
"We have assembled a great number of experts in their fields to write for this book, all of whom care about helping nurses make sense of their documentation."
Christine and Gaye wrote three of the 15 chapters, mostly about gap analysis and risk assessment, and edited the final result.
