Are you interested in promoting excellence in home healthcare nursing? The International Home Care Nurses Organization (IHCNO) invites you to participate in a free webinar on October 25, 2017, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The purpose of the webinar is to promote education and collaboration among home healthcare nurses across the United States and around the world, and to unveil a "white paper" that provides guidelines for how home healthcare nurses can achieve excellence in their mission to provide optimal healthcare services to patients in their homes.
The IHCNO is a grassroots organization of home healthcare nurses interested in assuring the health and well-being of patients in their homes through professional home healthcare nursing practice. The IHCNO vision has been to communicate, connect, and collaborate with home healthcare nurses around the globe, creating an international community of nurses who spur one another to excellence in home healthcare practice. Three conferences have been held: Cleveland, Ohio in 2013; Singapore in 2014; and Chicago, Illinois in 2015. At these conferences, nurses shared their challenges and achievements as home healthcare nurses, reviewed one another's research related to home care, and discussed how to increase the professionalism of home healthcare nursing practice. This year we are offering a free webinar accessible to home healthcare nurses around the world.
Seasoned home healthcare nurses know that our practice consists of knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are unique to caring for patients in their homes-a specialized area of nursing practice. Home healthcare nurses around the globe share unique concerns that are different from the concerns of nurses in other areas of practice. We believe that home healthcare nurses from diverse cultures and countries should form collegial relationships that support care for patients in their homes. For instance, at past IHCNO conferences, nurses from Australia, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore shared home healthcare models that are creative, innovative, and advanced compared with the Medicare model in the United States. Nurses in some developing countries, including Africa, the Middle East and Asia, shared their efforts to institute home healthcare into their countries' healthcare systems.
At the 2015 IHCNO conference, nurses from various countries (especially those from countries where home healthcare nursing is in its infancy) asked the IHCNO to develop guidelines that could help nurses throughout the world chart a course toward excellence in home healthcare nursing practice. A taskforce of international home healthcare nurses was recruited and the International Guidelines for Home Health Nursing was developed through an iterative process of reviews and revisions.
We invite you to participate in the October 25, 2017 webinar to hear about the Guidelines and how and why they were developed. Register at http://www.ihcno.org/registration. Thanks to the graciousness of our sponsors, LaSalle University and Home Healthcare Now, there is no cost to participate in the webinar. It will be available in real time throughout the world from any laptop computer, and participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question/answer session. It will be recorded so home healthcare nurses around the globe can access it after a good night's sleep or a day caring for patients in their homes. Nurses accessing the webinar through the recording can ask questions via a chat feature, and answers will be posted. An article describing the development of the Guidelines, as well as the Guidelines themselves, will be in the October 2017 issue of Home Healthcare Now Visit us at: http://www.ihcno.org.