Implementation of a Vascular Nursing Consultation in a reference hospital

Abstract

The objective of this work was to describe the start-up and organization of the Vascular Nursing Office of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, to detail the activity carried out during its first six months of existence, to analyze the obstacles that hinder the autonomous professional practice of the nurses working in that office and to propose solutions.
The number of visits for consultation, the medical and nursing diagnoses of the patients, the nursing interventions and the type of wounds presented by the patients were evaluated. 153 patients were treated and the majority of registered nursing interventions were: "Health education" and "Care of wounds and other injuries".
The main obstacle detected to date is of a technological nature, since the computer application used in outpatient hospital consultations, far from facilitating the autonomous role of nurses, makes it difficult.

The Vascular Nursing Consultation enhances the autonomy of professional practice and favors personalized attention in outpatient consultations of the Angiology and Vascular Surgery Service. For the nurses in this consultation to achieve their full potential, and for the results of their actions to be measurable and visible, it is necessary to implement healthcare information systems that are compatible with such a basic methodological tool for the profession as the nursing process, and that allow recording the data derived from the assessment of the patient and all the activity carried out by using standardized vocabularies. Within the vocabularies used in our environment, we think that the ATIC terminology would be the most convenient option.