Nurses' heart failure discharge planning part I: The impact of interdisciplinary relationships and patient behaviors

The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to understand bedside nurses' motivation and decision-making during discharge planning for adult patients with HF on a 48-bed telemetry step-down unit. Heart failure (HF) discharge planning interventions have largely excluded the contributions of bedside nurses. Fifteen bedside nurses were interviewed. Coding was done using NVivo and thematic analysis was completed. This paper is the first in a two-part series which presents separate results of the interpretive descriptive study delineating the factors that impact bedside nurses' motivation and decision-making during HF discharge planning. This paper presents the major finding of nurses' high levels of motivation to do effective discharge planning despite many barriers, such as poor physician-nurse communication and patient behaviors. These nurses described being motivated when they had good communication from the interdisciplinary team and time to establish a personal connection with patients. Overall, findings of this study emphasized a need for interdisciplinary relationship-building between bedside nurses, patients, and physicians to be factored into the organizational culture.