PMID: 16936525

Issn Print: 0884-741X

Publication Date: 2006/07/01


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The Rehabilitation Nurse Specialist in Home Care

LESLIE NEAL-BOYLAN

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Excerpt

Ms. S. is a 30-year-old newly married woman recently discharged from the hospital to her home following an embolitic stroke. On the admission home visit, Ms. S. presents with severe left-sided hemiparesis and expressive aphasia. She and her husband are devastated by the stroke and the severity of the resulting disabilities. They are married for less than 1 year and prior to the incident both worked full-time.
Rehabilitation nurses are especially skilled at assisting patients and families to adapt an illness or disability to their lifestyle. Although there are still too few home health agencies that maintain a staff of rehabilitation nurse specialists, the role is ideally suited to home care. The principles of home health nursing and rehabilitation nursing are highly congruent as both specialties seek to work “with” the client instead of “do to/for” the client, both function best in an interdisciplinary environment, and both seek to teach the client and the family self-care and independence in as natural an environment as possible. Rehabilitation nursing can be defined as “the diagnosis and treatment of human responses of individuals and groups to actual or potential health problems relative to altered functional ability and lifestyle” (Association of Rehabilitation Nurses [ARN], 2000, p. 6).
Rehabilitation nursing, as a specialty practice, was organized in 1964 and the ARN was formed by 1974 and developed the Standards and Scope of Rehabilitation Nursing (1994) to guide rehabilitation nursing practice. Nurses have implemented the role of rehabilitation nursing in a variety of settings, including outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation facilities, acute, subacute, long-term, and home and community settings. Rehabilitation nurses may be generalists or work within a client-centered model by working solely with pediatric or older populations or with persons with a particular type of disability, such as a head or a spinal cord injury.
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