In this supplement of ACTA for health profession, the topics discussed in the various articles highlight the importance of evaluating objective and subjective parameters in the health professions, underlining how the integration of these two approaches, in the health care, leads to the achievement of a high personalized standard of care.
In particular, this issue addresses specific topics related to nursing care: sensitive topics in nursing processes such as the specific nursing skills needed to track ventilatory asynchronies in patients and a retrospective analysis of factors related to unplanned extubations, problems that the nursing professionals are to manage in clinical practice and that still deserve further studies to guarantee an increasingly specific and timely intervention, allowing to increase the patient’s safety. Another topic here addressed, always linked to the professional nursing practice, are the healthcare associated injuries among nursing students, analyzing a specific context and trying to identify which factors, even in this case, reduce the risk and increase the safety, this time for professionals.
There are, however, analysis that start from another point of view, linked to subjective experience and personal well-being or malaise, in both professionals working in the healthcare sector (formal caregivers), and in those who have a caregiving function for people close to them, without having a specific profession (informal caregivers).
It is central, in fact, for the Editorial Board of this journal, highlighting how the crucial issues in the health professions are not only related to instrumental and technical skills, but also to transversal skills focused on reading the context, the individual needs of all the actors present in the care system (patients, caregivers, professionals), therefore linked to human and professional skills of understanding and empathy.
For this reason, in this issue there is a contribution that seeks to integrate these technical-human skills in a single approach: the Integrated Narrative Nursing Model (INNM).
This journal has already chosen to embrace this line of investigation that places at the center of the skills of a specialized health professional the ability to train, integrating in a continuous stream of professional and personal growth qualitative and quantitative skills for the evaluation of the person. Specifically, in the contribution present here two specific methods of diagnosis are integrated: the standard and the narrative one. The goal is to demonstrate how these two types of diagnosis can and must be integrated to arrive to an analysis of the person and not only of the pathology. This allows to conceive and co-construct with him/her a truly personalized intervention plan, taking into account the shortcomings, the weaknesses but also and above all, the real and perceived strengths of the person, as an aid to stimulate an active process of care and taking charge of oneself. In this issue, therefore, the focus is linked to the technical and human growth and development, that a health professional can and must achieve, to increase more and more the possibilities of treatment.
Chiara Cosentino
Giovanni Artioli
Leopoldo Sarli