Ambulatory Care Nurse-Sensitive Indicators Series: Starting with Low-Hanging Fruit: Proposing the Adaptation Of Health Care Measures to the Role of the Nurse in Ambulatory Care.

The American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing's Nurse-Sensitive Indicator Task Force was charged with identifying and developing meaningful measures for the ambulatory care environment. Several strategies were used to identify measures that would reflect the value of the role of the nurse in this setting. One such strategy was to conduct a comprehensive review of the health care environment as a whole and the measures within it, to identify measures that already existed that could easily be adapted to the role of the nurse in ambulatory care settings.

Nursing-Sensitive Indicators in Ambulatory Care.

Ambulatory nursing care can be difficult to comprehend in all its complexity. In August 2013, the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing commissioned a task force to identify nursing-sensitive indicators specific to ambulatory care settings. Given the great variation in settings, staff mix, patient populations, role dimensions, skill sets, documentation systems, and resources, determining metrics that apply across the entire continuum of care is a daunting task.