Final answer:
A nurse helps achieve the goals of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program by ensuring that a patient understands their prescribed medications, which is crucial for managing care at home and preventing readmissions.
Step-by-step explanation:
The action by the nurse that helps to achieve the goals of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program is a. The nurse ensures that the patient understands how to take prescribed medications correctly. This is because one of the key objectives of the program is to reduce hospital readmissions by ensuring that patients are well-prepared to manage their care at home, which includes a proper understanding of medication management. Effective medication management can prevent complications and decrease the likelihood of a patient needing to be readmitted to the hospital. Other actions such as developing therapeutic relationships and providing immediate clinical care (like elevating the head of bed and administering oxygen) are important for acute patient care but are not specifically targeted at reducing readmissions.
Direct supervision of a registered nurse is important in providing care such as dialysis treatments, which requires a comprehensive understanding of the patient's history, current condition, and an ability to monitor and respond to the patients' needs. Moreover, Theatre in Health Education practices improve healthcare practitioners' bedside manner, which can indirectly affect readmission rates by ensuring better communication and understanding between patients and medical staff. Finally, developing policies that consider the balance between costs of treatments, patient quality of life, and risks to individual privacy are critical components in the broader context of patient care and can influence readmissions.