Reference:
- Kozier & Erb’s Fundamentals of Nursing: Concepts, Process, and Practice, 11th Edition, ISBN 9780135428733, by Audrey Berman, Shirlee J. Snyder, and Geralyn Frandsen (Ch. 1, pp. 43-44)
- Caregiver: assistance of the client physically and psychologically while preserving the client’s dignity. The required nursing actions may involve full care for the completely dependent client, partial care for the partially dependent client, and supportive-educative care to assist client in attaining their highest possible level of health and wellness. Caregiving encompasses the physical, psychosocial, developmental, cultural, and spiritual levels.
- Communicator: communication is integral to all nursing roles. Nurses communicate with the client, support individuals, other health professionals, and people in the community. In the role of communicator, nurses identify client problems and then communicate these verbally or in writing to other members of the healthcare team. The quality of a nurse’s communication is an important factor in nursing care. The nurse must be able to communicate clearly and accurately in order for a client’s healthcare needs to be met.
- Teacher: as a teacher, the nurse helps clients learn about their health and the healthcare procedures they need to perform to restore or maintain their health. The nurse assesses the client’s learning needs and readiness to learn, sets specific learning goals in conjunction with the client, enacts teaching strategies, and measures learning. Nurses also teach assistive personnel (AP) to whom they assign care, and they share their expertise with other nurses and health professionals.
- Advocate: A client advocate acts to protect the client. In this role the nurse may represent the client’s needs and wishes to other health professionals, such as relaying the client’s request for information to the healthcare provider. They also assist clients in exercising their rights and help them speak up for themselves.
- Counselor: counseling is the process of helping a client to recognize and cope with stressful psychologic or social problems, to develop improved interpersonal relationships, and to pro mote personal growth. It involves providing emotional, intellectual, and psychologic support. The nurse counsels primarily healthy individuals with normal adjustment difficulties and focuses on helping the individual develop new attitudes, feelings, and behaviors by encouraging the client to look at alternative behaviors, recognize the choices, and develop a sense of control.
- Change Agent: the nurse acts as a change agent when assisting clients to make modifications in their behavior. Nurses also often act to make changes in a system, such as clinical care, if it is not helping a client return to health. Nurses are continually dealing with change in the healthcare system. Technologic change, change in the age of the client population, and changes in medications are just a few of the changes nurses deal with daily.
- Leader: a leader influences others to work together to accomplish a specific goal. The leader role can be employed at different levels: individual client, family, groups of clients, colleagues, or the community. Effective leadership is a learned process requiring an understanding of the needs and goals that motivate people, the knowledge to apply the leadership skills, and the interpersonal skills to influence others.
- Manager: the nurse manages the nursing care of individuals, families, and communities. The nurse manager also assigns and delegates nursing activities to ancillary workers and other nurses, and supervises and evaluates their performance. Managing requires knowledge about organizational structure and dynamics, authority and accountability, leadership, change theory, advocacy, assignment, delegation, and supervision and evaluation.
- Case Manager: nurse case managers work with the multidisciplinary health care team to measure the effectiveness of the case management plan and to monitor outcomes. Each agency or unit specifies the role of the nurse case manager. In some institutions, the case manager works with primary or staff nurses to oversee the care of a specific caseload. In other agencies, the case manager is the primary nurse or provides some level of direct care to the client and family. Regardless of the setting, case managers help ensure that care is oriented to the client, while controlling costs.
- Research Consumer: nurses often use research to improve client care. In a clinical area, nurses need to (a) have some awareness of the process and language of research, (b) be sensitive to issues related to protecting the rights of human subjects, (c) participate in the identification of significant researchable problems, and (d) be a discriminating consumer of research findings.