Vision for the Future of Nursing - Speech or Presentation Example

Evidence-based nursing draws upon the results and findings of ongoing research in nursing so that knowledge incorporates into practice, and the quality of health care improves. The application of nursing theory has immense influence upon the professional nursing practice. Nursing theories assist nurses in the prediction and analysis of, and rational decision making in every day experiences. Nursing theories facilitate the intervention process by providing the nurses with a rationale for obtaining reliable information regarding the patients’ health.

Nursing theories establish the standards for the measurement of quality of healthcare provided by the nurses. Finally, the nursing theories function to enhance the autonomy of nurses by defining their individualistic roles and responsibilities. Nurses need to have an adequate knowledge of the nursing theories to enhance their productivity and rational decision making ability. Two features that lay the foundations of almost any kind of model of healthcare delivery are mobility and portability.

Today, these features are evident in the growth of ambulatory healthcare centers, freestanding clinics as well as all sorts of nonhospital settings. Trends are changing for the better and more Americans are aging at their homes rather than in old houses these days. There is increased tendency for children to avoid institutions for their parents in the future. This imparts the need for the nurses to deliver the care at the patients’ homes. “There’s a shift away from institutional care toward individual responsibility, and a move from hospitals and nursing homes to retail, kiosks, and home” (Hines cited in Saver, 2006).

This is inconsistent with the general training of the nurses in which they gain education so as to deliver care in a hospital-based environment. In addition to that patients today want increased level of personal control over their healthcare, which generates a need for the nurses to develop innovative methods of delivery of healthcare and expect more self-diagnostic tests by the patients. These changes have increased the number of challenges for the seasoned nurses. To play their role effectively as before, it is imperative that the hospital-based nurses place more emphasis on assisting the patients with transiting to where they will mostly heal; their homes.

Nursing schools are currently suffering from budget constraints because of which, millions of qualified applicants turn away. There has also been a shortage of nursing faculty in the recent years. Research suggests that almost 50% of the faculty members serving in the nursing schools would have reached the age of retirement within the next 10 years; “the anticipated attrition represents a crisis in the making, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the replenishment of the nurse workforce, which is itself on the verge of losing some 500,000 nurses to retirement” (Aiken, 2011).

The decline of the graduation rate of nurses as well as the nursing faculty is a matter of great concern, especially when there are numerous good employment opportunities for nurses in the present age. The fundamental reason this is happening is that nursing students and faculty members are required to return to school after the completion of basic education and a couple of additional academic degrees and not many nurses find this route simple enough to