As healthcare systems confront rising demands and workforce shortages, advanced practice nursing (APN) has emerged globally as a vital strategy to improve care delivery and address systemic gaps, particularly in primary care facilities in low- and middle-income countries like the Philippines.
Qualitative case study.
This study was conducted in a rural setting in the Philippines and draws on a preceding mixed-methods case study that explored task shifting and advanced nursing practice in primary care facilities. Using purposeful sampling, 41 nurses, physicians, academics, policymakers, and recipients of care participated in interviews and focus group discussions. Qualitative data were thematically analyzed in ATLAS.ti, and quantitative data were descriptively analyzed in JASP. Findings were integrated into the APN framework tailored to primary care in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Although the Philippines lacks a formal APN policy, nurses informally fulfill many advanced practice roles aligned with Hamric's model, particularly in direct patient care, leadership, collaboration, and evidence-based practice. Key enabling competencies include health promotion, systems thinking, and policy implementation—environmental barriers such as a lack of regulatory frameworks, educational pathways, and financing limit APN institutionalization.
This study proposes a contextualized advanced practice nursing (APN) model, which is relevant for LMICs, particularly in primary care facilities facing workforce shortages and rising NCD burdens. To institutionalize APN roles, key reforms should include investments in education, certification, financing, and regulation. Settings implementing initiatives to attain universal health coverage can serve as entry points for recognizing APN functions through competency-based systems.
The study proposes a contextualized APN framework for low-resource settings, showing that formalizing expanded nursing roles through education and certification can enhance access to quality care and advance UHC in underserved areas.
With ambient listening systems increasingly adopted in healthcare, analyzing clinician-patient conversations has become essential. The Omaha System is a standardized terminology for documenting patient care, classifying health problems into four domains across 42 problems and 377 signs/symptoms. Manually identifying and mapping these problems is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This study aims to automate health problem identification from clinician-patient conversations using large language models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Using the Omaha System framework, we analyzed 5118 utterances from 22 clinician-patient encounters in home healthcare. RAG-enhanced LLMs detected health problems and mapped them to Omaha System terminology. We evaluated different model configurations, including embedding models, context window sizes, parameter settings (top k, top p), and prompting strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought). Three LLMs—Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-o3-mini—were compared using precision, recall, and F1-score against expert annotations.
The optimal configuration used a 1-utterance context window, top k = 15, top p = 0.6, and few-shot learning with chain-of-thought prompting. GPT-4o-mini achieved the highest F1-score (0.90) for both problem and sign/symptom identification, followed by GPT-o3-mini (0.83/0.82), while Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct performed worst (0.73/0.72).
Using the Omaha System, LLMs with RAG effectively automate health problem identification in clinical conversations. This approach can enhance documentation completeness, reduce documentation burden, and potentially improve patient outcomes through more comprehensive problem identification, translating into tangible improvements in clinical efficiency and care delivery.
Automating health problem identification from clinical conversations can improve documentation accuracy, reduce burden, and ensure alignment with standardized frameworks like the Omaha System, enhancing care quality and continuity in home healthcare.
Dementia resulting from type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) complications significantly impacts older adults' quality of life, increasing suffering for both patients and their families. Numerous studies have identified self-management as a key factor in adopting appropriate health behaviors to prevent diabetes-related complications. However, internationally, there is insufficient empirical evidence for individual and family process factors predicting dementia prevention behaviors in older adults with T2DM. Therefore, we aimed to explore how dementia-preventive self-management behaviors (outcome dimension) are related to contextual and process dimensions based on the Individual and Family Self-Management Theory (IFSMT).
A cross-sectional observational study.
The 444 older adults with T2DM from six community hospitals in Chiang Mai completed valid and reliable self-reported measures, including a Socio-demographic Questionnaire, the Dementia Prevention of Individual and Family Self-Management Process Questionnaire (DP-IFSM-PQ), and the Dementia Preventive Self-Management Behavior Questionnaire (DPSMBQ). Data were analyzed using bivariate correlations, partial correlations, and multivariate linear regression with the stepwise method.
Most participants exhibited high levels of individual and family self-management processes and dementia-preventive self-management behaviors. Bivariate and partial correlation analyses revealed a significant association between DP-IFSM-PQ and DPSMBQ scores. Stepwise multiple linear regression identified self-efficacy, a subdomain of DP-IFSM-PQ, as the strongest predictor of DPSMBQ scores. Other significant predictors included awareness of dementia prevention among family members, neighbors, and the community; family income sufficiency; history of comorbidities; distance to the hospital; and knowledge and beliefs (a subdomain of the DP-IFSM-PQ). The regression model was statistically significant (F [1, 437] = 46.662, p = 0.000, Adjusted R2 = 0.382).
Self-efficacy and knowledge and beliefs, based on IFSMT, are key predictors of dementia-preventive behaviors among older adults with T2DM. These predictors could be used as potential intervention components in a subsequent co-design study for promoting dementia preventive self-management behaviors in older adults with T2DM. The results
Older adults may experience a wish to die in the context of deteriorating health, a loss of autonomy, loneliness, or depression. Home care workers may likewise experience burden or symptoms of depression as a result of prolonged contact with this physical and emotional suffering. Training initiatives that can support the well-being of home care workers are therefore important.
To describe the typical profile of older adults who express a wish to die to their home care worker, and to examine whether a psycho-educational intervention for care workers exploring the end-of-life process and self-care strategies had an impact on the older adult's wish to die and on the care worker's perceived burden and depressive symptoms.
Quasi-experimental, longitudinal study involving non-randomized experimental and control groups and follow-up at 3–6 months post-intervention.
At the start of the study, all care workers (n = 126) provided sociodemographic information (age, gender) for themselves and the care recipient, and completed the Karnofsky Performance Status scale and the Assessment of the Frequency and Extent of the Desire to Die (AFEDD) interview to provide a baseline measure of the care recipient's functional status and wish to die. They also completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI) as a measure of their own perceived burden and depressive symptoms. The AFEDD, BDI, and ZBI were completed again by care workers at 3 and 6 months post-intervention.
The typical profile of care recipients was a woman aged 85.5 years who required considerable support and assistance and who had at least occasionally experienced a wish to die, although these thoughts were not always verbalized. Scores on the AFEDD remained relatively stable over the follow-up period in both the control and experimental groups. There was no significant association between the older adult's wish to die and depressive symptoms in the care worker across the study period. However, a positive and significant correlation between a wish to die in the older adult and perceived burden in the care worker was observed at 6 months post-intervention in both the total sample (p = 0.032) and among controls (p = 0.028). By contrast, this significant association was not found for care workers in the experimental group (p = 0.376), sugges
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：