Kristine Alster

The Deserved Care Framework for Evaluating Health Care Quality

Excessively narrow definitions of health care quality do not identify certain important components of health care for clinicians, providers, or patients. Excessively broad definitions drive up health care costs and encourage unjustified interventions. This article proposes a framework for examining health care quality that distinguishes between what patients need, want, and deserve, and it advances the idea that deserved care is the relevant concept of care to inform health policy debates.

Collaboration with Master’s Students in Home Health Care Research

Changes in health care have created an increasingly complex home health care environment, one in which knowledge derived from research is essential to provide patient care. The development of knowledge is enhanced when nurse researchers, nurse providers, and graduate nursing students collaborate to conduct research. Collaboration in research has many benefits. It benefits graduate students by providing opportunities to gain the skills needed for the advance practice role. It benefits academic researchers by advancing their programs of research, providing additional student resources and a fresh perspective. It benefits providers and the nursing profession by expanding knowledge that defines the profession, drives practice, and holds nurses accountable. Most important, collaborative research efforts benefit patients by assuring that nurses in the future are experienced in research and have the abilities to design, implement, and evaluate nursing care based on scientific evidence, ensuring access to safe and effective care.