HUP's Nursing Philosophy
Nurses at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) are committed to providing patients and their families with high quality, individualized, safe, cost effective, and evidence based nursing care. This philosophy emanates from our beliefs and values, and is influenced by our education, experience and research in nursing and health care delivery.
Nursing care at HUP is focused on the needs of patients and families. HUP professional nurses practice autonomously under an Integrated Primary Nursing model of care, which is relationship based and ensures accountability and continuity of comprehensive care planned, directed and coordinated by the professional nurse in partnership with physicians and other health care providers. The nurse-patient/family relationship established by the primary nurse serves as a foundation for providing a holistic approach to treating the patient/family response to birth, health, illness and death.
We believe that the purpose of all activity in nursing is to help the healthy remain healthy, the ill regain health, those who cannot be cured to maximize their potential, and those who are dying to live life as wholly as possible and die with dignity when death is inevitable.
We believe that compliance with the Standards of Nursing Practice for the Registered Nurse, Standards of Professional Performance for the Registered Nurse and the National Patient Safety Standards. All contribute to our objective of continually improving the quality of patient/family care. We recognize that the measure of patient satisfaction is a key indicator of overall patient care quality. We monitor nursing sensitive indicators and benchmark our performance through participation in numerous national databases which include the ANA National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators.
We believe that patients and families, and the nurses who provide patient/family care have rights and responsibilities. Nurses at HUP foster intellectual, racial, social and cultural diversity by adhering to the elements in the Patient's Bill of Rights and the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics.
We support our HUP Nursing Model of Excellence in Professional Practice which incorporates a shared governance structure. Through a formalized structure of councils and committees, professional nurses have the ability to facilitate recommendations and make decisions that pertain to clinical care, quality improvement and nursing practice. Under shared governance, professional nurses assume full accountability for their practice. We believe that communication should flow bidirectionally and that information and knowledge of unit, departmental and corporate affairs must be exchanged throughout the organization.
We believe in the individual's right to express differing views and we encourage and support intellectual debate and discourse. Nurse leaders and clinical nurses collaborate in creating and sustaining healthy work environments, which support the practice of professional nursing. Skilled communication, collaboration, effective decision-making, appropriate staffing, respectful workplace and authentic leadership characterize these environments and result in the delivery of high quality patient care.
We believe that by working collaboratively with partners of other disciplines and departments, the Department of Nursing supports HUP in maintaining its reputation as a world-class patient care organization, a center of excellence and an employer of choice. Finally, we believe, as an academic health center, we have a shared mission of advancing knowledge through translational and innovative research and life long learning for nurses and the other members of the health care team.
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