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. Because of the complexity of the ambulatory care patient care environment, the group sought to reach momentum in indicator development by starting with the proposal of measures that would be less complex to develop, pilot, and adapt in organizations across the country.