Background

Healthcare provision remains challenging leading to a focus on health service redesign including the development of nurse-led clinics. While there is a belief that nurse-led services positively impact on healthcare delivery, it is necessary to inform development through examination of the evidence.

Methods

A search was conducted of Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus and the Cochrane Library for systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness of nurse-led clinics when compared with usual care published between 2015 and 2020. Outcomes of interest were clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction and patient access to health care. Study quality was appraised using the AMSTAR 2 tool (A MeaSurement tool to Assess Systematic Reviews). A narrative analysis was conducted.

Results

From 681 identified studies, nine were included, with reporting quality rated from very low to high quality. Patient clinical outcomes were reported as equal to or better than usual care across all studies included. There was evidence of high levels of patient satisfaction with nurse-led clinics across the included systematic reviews. While access to health care was the least reported variable, there were reports that access to health care increased or patient reliance on other healthcare providers reduced due to nurse-led clinics.

Conclusions

Despite the heterogeneous nature of the systematic reviews, along with some quality issues in reporting, there was evidence that nurse-led services provided comparable or superior care to usual care with high levels of patient satisfaction. There was a lack of reporting on the impact of nurse-led clinics on patient access to health care; further research is required on this area. Health service managers should consider nurse-led clinics an effective innovation in health service provision.