title: Challenges for nurse practitioners: realistic health outcomes for developmentally disabled individuals.
abstract: Developing, measuring, and reporting clinical outcomes is challenging for all health care providers. Nurse practitioners are qualified and suited to work with developmentally disabled clients and their special needs. A review of current literature shows that several isolated studies on clinically relevant topics have been published. Strategies are explained here to assist nurse practitioners in developing systems for tracking individual client data and for creating outcome-based networks to increase the generalizability of findings.
authors.affiliation: Mennonite College of Nursing, Illinois State University, Normal 61790, USA. nriden@ilstu.edu
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ridenour
mesh_terms: D019985:Benchmarking; D002658:Developmental Disabilities / Q000451:nursing*; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D020380:Needs Assessment; D009722:Nurse Practitioners / Q000592:standards*; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*