Fundamentals of Care
The Fundamentals of Care Framework outlines what is involved in the delivery of safe, effective, high-quality fundamental care, and what this care should look like in any healthcare setting and for any care recipient. The framework draws attention to the importance of providing situational and person-centred care that meets patient care needs in a competent, respectful, personal, and empathetic way.
The Fundamentals of Care framework has been developed by members of the International Learning Collaborative (ILC) as a reaction to studies demonstrating that patients’ individual needs for healthcare are not always addressed and that person-centred care is under pressure.
The Centre of Excellence specifically focuses on Fundamentals of Care in the:
- Development of the nursing profession
- Development of the nursing curriculum
- Development of clinical leadership and clinical decision-making
The Centre of Excellence contributes to a well-established, formalised, cross-institutional research collaboration on FoC between six healthcare institutions in Northern Denmark of which the Department of Nursing at UCN is a founding partner of The International Learning Collaborative.
NURSE MANAGERS’ SUPPORT OF FUNDAMENTAL CARE
The aim of the project was to explore ward-based nurse managers’ own views on how they support nurses to undertake high-quality fundamental care. The project is a qualitative study guided by the principles of interpretive description. Thirty-one nurse managers from three publicly funded hospitals in Australia, Denmark and New Zealand took part in group interviews to discuss how they support fundamental care in their clinical areas.
STUDENT APPLICATION OF FUNDAMENTALS OF CARE
The aim of this project was to explore how student nurses perceive and apply the Fundamentals of Care framework in case-based work in the nursing education programme. A second aim was to describe the factors that influence their perceptions and application of the Framework. The study design was focused, ethnography, in which data was collected through participant observations, focus group interviews and individual interviews. Informants were student nurses in the fifth semester and their supervisors.
TRANSITION FROM STUDENT NURSE TO NEWLY GRADUATED NURSE
The aim of this PhD project was to explore the transition from being a student nurse to becoming a graduate nurse with particular focus on caring for and working with patients and the applicability of the Fundamentals of Care framework. The project comprises 3 component studies that focus on summing up existing knowledge about newly graduated nurses’ experiences in giving care and on exploring how contextual factors and cultural patterns affect how newly-graduated Danish nurses give care.