Curbside consultation: A means to promote quality patient care

Highlights

What does this paper contribute to the wider global clinical community?

• Screening nurse practitioners is an essential first step in engaging clinicians in a discussion about a natural clinician behavior, curbside consultation.

• Nurse practitioners are able to provide quality care resulting in increased patient satisfaction and cost-savings. Improving access to expertise through curbside consultation may be a means of expanding the nurse practitioners’ autonomy and role.

• A promoter of relationships and institutional culture, curbside consultation may be incorporated in the national strategy to provide impactful, interprofessional, and coordinated care.

• With effective communication among clinicians, curbside consultation may be an important facilitator to achieve necessary levels of proficiency, assimilation, and knowledge sharing, including evidence-based practices.

Abstract

The objective of this descriptive, cross-sectional study was to describe curbside consultation, a bidirectional informal discussion with a colleague “expert” concerning patient care, among nurse practitioners. Curbside consultations are valuable, yet little is known about this process use for nurse practitioners. A national convenience sample was recruited using online social media platforms and email. Data were collected in June 2019 via Qualtrics survey software. Web-based survey included 80 questions concerning use and definition of curbside consultation, and followed STROBE guidelines for reporting. Questions also concerned work environment, personal and interpersonal qualities, communication modality and patient engagement. Descriptive and survey item analyses including frequency, percentage, means and standard deviation, Chi-square and Fisher's Exact Test, Pearson's correlation analysis, and one-way independent t-tests. Participants included nurse practitioners (N = 402) in primary (51.2%, N = 206) and specialty care (46%, N = 185). Nurse practitioners reported positive experiences with curbside consultations (96.8%, N = 384) and that reliable access to colleagues was correlated with multiple variables, including practice culture (r = 0.494, p = .001). Most reported (99%, N = 387) patients receive better care with successful curbside consultation. Curbside consultations provide nurse practitioners information access at point-of-care for implementation of evidence-based practice to promote quality patient care. Addition of curbside consultation education is a compelling consideration of nurse practitioner curriculum.

Introduction

Curbside consultations (CC) or informal discussions with colleagues about the care of a patient occur commonly and are favored by clinicians as an information-seeking resource. This study describes the process of CC for nurse practitioners (NPs) using a national cross-sectional survey. Understanding the CC process for NPs will allow optimization of this process and identification of potential limitations. Improved communication among clinicians can increase interprofessional collaboration and collegiality for providing holistic patient care using the CC process (IOM, 2015; WHO, 2010).