Clinical Focus and Advocacy in Patients Care in Specialist Nursing Literature review

Clinical Focus and Advocacy in Patients Care in Specialist Nursing Practice - Literature review Example The current trend of offering master’s programs in nursing schools was seen to start begin around the 1970’s with the gradual phasing out of the public health nursing programs in most of the schools offering public health studies. The very first programs to start preparing and offering Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) courses started doing so in the 1950’s (Fulton, Lyon and Goudreau 2010). A clinical nurse specialist (CNS) can be described basically as an advanced practice and registered nurse who has undergone graduate preparation resulting in their earning a master’s or doctorate from one of the programs that prepares clinical nursing specialists. Clinical nurse specialists are generally experts at the diagnosis and eventual treatment of illness that fall in their area of expertise. The focus of clinical nurse specialist generally falls into three basic areas; these areas are administration, patients and their respective families and nurse management. Although these three spheres are seen to be interrelated and it is quite normal for them to overlap, they are quite different and possess distinctive focus from each other. In all three areas of influence, the primary role of the CNS is to ensure that there is continuous improvement of the nursing care and patient outcome in general (Fulton, Lyon and Goudreau 2010). The rest of a medical facilities nursing staff tend to look to the Clinical Nurse Specialist to help them improve the efficiency in the work place as well as to receive guidance as they perform their everyday nursing duties. Some of the key elements of practicing CNS is to ensure that there is the creation of an environment that can be seen to implement effective system changes and mentoring programs that will help in the empowerment of nurses who are better able to adequately respond to the diverse patient needs, and develop caring best practices that are not only evidence based but are also able to alleviate