Asssessing and improving the consultation skills of nurses

Consultation Assessment and Improvement Instrument for Nurses (CAIIN) provides a set of competences that describe what a practitioner does when consulting with patients. These include behaviours to develop good relationships with patients, ways of communicating that allow the patient to tell the story of illness in their own words, practical procedures such as using diagnostic instruments and the thinking processes needed to make accurate diagnoses and negotiate the most appropriate care plan. This approach facilitates the development of a patient-centred, problem-solving style of consultation. This talk will describe the importance of this approach, and will describe how the CAIIN was developed from a similar instrument used with GPs and medical students, and continue by discussing how it can facilitate the teaching of advanced consultation skills to nurses in extended roles.