Issues that the Nursing Profession Faces Today - Coursework Example

The Nursing Profession 17 April Introduction Nursing involves real care and compassion with a patient whether that patient has an infectious disease or not through a process of humane treatment. Professional nurses care for people in a natural way and real nursing is more than just a job. Nursing is a vocation which means being a professional nurse requires training and standard qualifications. This means a nurse must be suited to the practice of caring for people through temperament and character. Nursing today is properly recognized as a separate profession. Being a nurse means saving the lives of people in distress, help them recover from illnesses and diseases, let people stay healthy and in general provide medical advice on things like nutrition, pregnancy and health maintenance. Nursing is a critical part of the health care delivery team and has evolved into various sub-specialties. This paper discusses some issues that the nursing profession faces today. The medical profession in general has grown in unbelievable complexity due to big advances in medical technology, the discovery of new drugs and more novel forms of treatment. Nurses today are expected to be so many things to all people all at once which sometimes results in unrealistic expectations. Discussion will focus on certain challenges the nursing profession is required to address in order to stay relevant in the lives of people. Discussion Nursing in previous centuries was originally meant to signify someone who can take care of a new-born baby, hence the term wet nurse (and later on, dry nurse). However, nursing has retained its original connotation of looking after someone who is not in the pink of health and nursed back to health by the provision of treatment, proper medical care and performance of various clinical functions. The nursing profession was once looked down in earlier times because nurses were seen as competitors by doctors in giving medical care. Only later in the seventeenth century did nursing took a professional and respectable role in society through a holistic approach (Fitzpatrick 18). There is an acute shortage of nurses today as more people are getting older due to a major shift in demographics. There are many issues and challenges that the nursing profession faces today. The evolution of health care requires nursing to be flexible and dynamic to change with the times and keep up with recent medical developments in the field. One offshoot of this rapidly evolving medical field is the high expectations the public wants from all nurses which results in the overlap of related duties. Another is the trend towards specialization as health care is becoming very complex and requires functional expertise in several areas of medical care. In cases of overlap, nurses today perform functions originally done by doctors only such as taking a patient’s physical examination, the administration of drugs, determination of correct dosage and writing prescriptions. A move into specialization is called differentiated nursing and this can be defined in terms of titles (as a registered nurse, certified nursing assistant, licensed practical nurse, nurse practitioners, advanced practice nurse, etc.) and functions (pediatric, geriatric, long-term care, acute or emergency treatment, psychiatric, post-operative care, etc.). Nursing is a highly-personalized type of service and the profession is held to a high standard in terms of customer satisfaction. Customers in this sense refer not only to patients but also to other stakeholders such as hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, business firms who contract nursing services and the recent rise of a new phenomenon in the form of health maintenance organizations or HMOs. Most patients are increasingly very demanding due to an increased knowledge in medical matters and patients taking a more active participation in treatment plans. Nurses today are expected to stay current with their unique set of skills and the needed medical and clinical competencies to render satisfactory levels of service. The profession has responded to these various demands in a very positive manner by requiring nurses to enroll or attend continuing medical education (CME) to retain their licenses. The nursing profession has developed its own code of ethics to guide all nurses in practice with the latest revisions adopted in July 2001 by Congress of Nursing Practice. There are minimum standards to be met for the successful practice of nursing. Nursing profession itself has drafted and adopted its own code of ethics to regulate nursing and hold itself out to the general public as a group of professionals worthy of respect. Nurses are generally expected to know the latest protocols regarding a patient’s recovery plan and models of treatment and care. The general public often expects nurses to know many other things which no one can be expected to master successfully. There is a need to educate the public about what nurses can do and what they cannot deliver to avoid disappointments that can lead to complaints. There is admittedly a great deal of confusion among the general public on who is a nurse or not (Atkins 17). Part of the reason for this confusion is there are many pathways to becoming a nurse. The title of nurse properly belongs to those who are registered nurses (RNs) who had passed the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) and there are several ways to become eligible to take this examination (ibid. 18). The first option of becoming a nurse is enrolling in a formal diploma nursing school and this pathway offers some of the best nursing education because of affiliation with a hospital that provides availability and proximity to real patients. Other ways of becoming a nurse are through associate degree programs (a vocational course obtained from a community college and takes just two years to complete) and baccalaureate nursing programs. The third and fourth ways of getting a nurse license are through a master’s degree program and doctorate in nursing program. These last two ways are not entry-level programs but are more directed towards the teaching of nursing as a profession and as means of becoming a supervisor in a large medical institution. This means nursing is not limited to being health care providers but also as source of qualified persons as policymakers, educators and researchers. Nurses today work in many settings besides hospitals like retirement homes, giant pharmaceutical firms, research outfits and community centers. The nursing Code of Ethics covers many areas of nursing practice and deals with some of its issues such as avoiding possible conflicts of interest, ethical considerations, moral and legal obligations, protection of privacy by careful use of personally identifiable information, respect for human dignity and providing the best care possible by taking into account the patient’s best interests at all times. All nurses are expected to exhibit strong moral character for them to better deal with some complex issues associated with health care such as abortion, euthanasia (mercy killing), brain death, organ transplants and cases of malpractice. Nurses are expected to exhibit human compassion, high intelligence, responsiveness and patience when dealing with difficult situations, intransigent patients and sometimes angry families or relatives. A new or emerging field in nursing today is providing terminal care in end-of-life situations requiring sensitivity and understanding to people who are about to die known as palliative care. Nurses need to have good moral compass when dealing with demands and pressures of their work without somehow getting depressed, distressed or suffering a burnout. Morals are the sense of right and wrong which is derived in turn from our own cultural and personal values (Beauchamp & Childress 3). Ethics, on the other hand, pertains to applications of moral standards in real-life situations. There is likewise a clear need to view conflicts of interest that may arise in a broader context of ethical and moral principles. The nursing profession can also benefit from clearly distinguishing what is legal from what is ethical. The field of bio-medical ethics is a relatively new area and our legal system is not well equipped to deal with some difficult and complex issues confronting the nursing profession. Many laws are antiquated and cannot deal with the life-and-death issues nurses often face daily in the performance of duties. Conclusion The nursing profession has gained respectability and is no longer viewed as an adjunct to the practice of medicine in which nurses merely serve as glorified assistants to the doctors. A new paradigm in nursing in today’s health care environment is exemplified by a multiplicity of roles as majority of registered nurses (especially those who pursued higher studies) are now allowed to assess, diagnose and treat patients in a variety of settings (Aktan & Aktan 4). The modern nursing profession is both a challenging and rewarding career which is why I choose to become a nurse. It gives psychic and emotional fulfillment to be able to serve people. Works Cited Aktan, Nadine & Aktan, Nadine. M. Fast Facts for the New Nurse Practitioner: What You Really Need to Know in a Nutshell. New York, NY, USA: Springer Publishing Company, 2010. Print. Atkins, Robert. Getting the Most from Nursing School: A Guide to Becoming a Nurse. Sudbury, MA, USA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008. Print. Beauchamp, Tom L. & Childress, James F. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press US, 2008. Print. Fitzpatrick, Joyce J. “Reflections on Nightingale’s Perspective of Nursing.” Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not. Ed. Florence Nightingale. Philadelphia, PA, USA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1992. Print. (This is a re-issue of the original in 1859). Read More