Working in community health settings challenges nurses due to resource problems, budgetary constraints, and cultural-based approaches to healthy living in these areas. Despite the situation, nurses should always be ready and committed to providing high-quality care to diverse patients. Care coordination entails organizing patient care activities between multiple participants to ensure appropriate healthcare delivery (Karam et al., 2021). Accordingly, the nurse should understand care coordination dynamics, including patient engagement, goal-setting, and outcome evaluation. When the nurse manager tasks a nurse with care coordination, interventions should seek to optimize outcomes in a caring environment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a preliminary care coordination plan for a domestic violence victim.
Domestic violence is a severe public health problem and a human rights issue with profound physical, emotional, and social impacts. Health statistics indicate a worrying trend, given that one-third of women and one in four men encounter intimate partner violence at some point during their lifetime (Duchesne et al., 2023). Victims present themselves in healthcare settings with different issues, including mental, physical, and sexual harm. Effective and timely patient care is critical to preventing complexities, including depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain. Sabri et al. (2022) identified marginalized women as a disadvantaged group experiencing higher rates of domestic violence and homicides related to intimate partner violence (IPV). Nurses coordinating care should understand these dynamics and ensure the treatment plan addresses the patient’s multidimensional needs.
Best practices for health improvement include a holistic approach, compassionate care, and timely specialized care. A holistic approach considers the patient’s physical, psychosocial, and cultural aspects of the condition during screening, treatment, and post-discharge support. Physical considerations include injuries and bruises, while emotional distress, intrusive thoughts, and anxiety are priority psychosocial considerations. From a cultural dimension, a patient’s race, socioeconomic status, and beliefs shape their health-seeking behaviors and overall well-being (Sabri et al., 2022). Compassionate care enables the nurse to establish trust with patients and prevent interactions that may re-traumatize domestic violence victims. Timely specialized care helps to prevent devastating physical and psychological health problems.
The desire for the nurse to ensure these best practices makes several assumptions. For instance, the nurse expects patients to be comfortable and open up during interactions. As per Grillo et al. (2021), nurses should elicit the voices of domestic violence victims to deliver personalized, patient-centered interventions. Intentional, unbiased communication enables the patients to open up and feel safe in the clinical environment. The other assumption is that there will be no patient care avoidance, irrespective of the patient’s cultural, religious, and ethnic inclination. Based on these assumptions, it is uncertain whether there will be adequate resources to deliver personalized care to address patients’ diverse needs.
Nurses should prioritize a goal-driven approach to domestic violence to optimize outcomes and save resources. Helping the victims overcome negative feelings and thoughts is a leading goal in addressing domestic violence. Typical experiences include anxiety, guilt, confusion, and powerlessness (WomesLaw.Org, 2021). Achieving this goal requires the patient to identify three measures for overcoming negative feelings and thoughts at the end of the treatment session. The second goal is patient empowerment through counseling to enable domestic violence victims to make informed decisions (Craven et al., 2023). In this area, the nurse should educate patients to recognize different physical, emotional, and psychological manifestations of domestic violence (at least three major signs in each category). This empowerment also involves helping survivors understand their rights and where to report issues. The other crucial goal is resource identification. The patient should identify five community-based resources for safety, enhancing recovery, and timely healthcare supp
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