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Journal of Primary Health Care Journal of Primary Health Care Society
Journal of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Scope and activities of Māori health provider nurses: an audit of nurse–client encounters

Kyle Eggleton https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5645-8326 1 * , Ashleigh Brough 2 , Evelyn Suhren 3 , Jackie McCaskill 3
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

1 Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, The University of Auckland, 28 Park Avenue, Grafton, Auckland 1023, New Zealand.

2 Capital and Coast DHB, Wellington, New Zealand.

3 Ki A Ora Ngātiwai, 420 Kamo Road, Whangarei, New Zealand.

* Correspondence to: k.eggleton@auckland.ac.nz

Handling Editor: Felicity Goodyear-Smith

Journal of Primary Health Care 14(2) 109-115 https://doi.org/10.1071/HC22022
Published: 27 June 2022

© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Introduction: The activities and consultations undertaken by Māori health provider nurses are likely broad and operate within a Māori nursing model of care. However, there is little quantitative evidence to document and describe these encounters with clients. The Omaha coding system provides a mechanism in which to quantify nursing encounters through classifying client problems by domain, interventions and specific targets relating to interventions.

Aim: The aim of this study was to document the types of encounters and interventions undertaken by Māori health provider nurses.

Methods: An audit was undertaken of patient encounters occurring within a Māori health provider between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2020. Encounters were randomly selected and problems, activities and interventions coded utilising the Omaha coding system. Simple descriptive statistics were used.

Results: A total of 5897 nurse–client encounters occurred over the study period. Overall, 61% of the audited nurse–client encounters related to the physiological domain and only 6% of encounters were related to the psychosocial domain. And 29% of nursing interventions involved teaching/guiding/counselling and a further 29% of interventions were case management.

Discussion: The wide variety of conditions seen and the number of interventions carried out indicate the broad scope of Māori health provider nurses. However, there were likely undocumented problems, which could reflect the medicalisation of the electronic health record. Redesigning electronic health records to apply more of a nursing and Māori health provider lens may facilitate more inclusive ways of documentation.

Keywords: Audit, Consultations, Electronic health records, Māor health, Māori health providers, Nursing, Omaha system, Primary care.


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