Community nurses and their collaboration with clinical nurse consultants.

A survey was undertaken of 129 community nurses who had chosen to utilise a clinical nurse consultant for education and/or patient care at home. Accessibility, efficiency, usefulness of the consultation and the educative role of the clinical nurse consultant were examined. The responses indicated that the community nurses had positive perceptions regarding their collaboration with the clinical nurse consultants. It is recommended that an objective tool be developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the collaboration, for data collection purposes, when measuring patient outcomes and evaluating specialist resources.