Specialized Clinical Nurse - Essay Example

These challenges which face nurses in surgical wards can be clinically, professionally, or environmentally based. Clinical barriers to effective health care include lack of enough competent nurses, lack of adequate medical resources, and costly medical equipment and services. Most Universities and colleges should endeavor to offer advanced courses for specialized nurses in surgical wards and students should be encouraged to specialize in surgical ward nurses to solve this problem of limited surgical ward nurses. The government should come up with appropriate medical policies like assisting in providing medical equipment and services which are mostly unavailable and expensive such as protective devices to nurses taking care of patients who have gone through exposure-prone operations (Department of Health, 2008).

Professional barriers to quality and accessible health care include lack of established standards for practice and education, scarcity of health professionals, and failure to regularly monitor specialist nurses to ensure the safety of patients. The health professional body should come up with a set of standards which govern the behaviors of nurses in the surgical ward and which set high qualifications standards for the recruitment of surgical nurses to encourage nurses to go for advanced education. The health professional body should also establish a monitoring and review process whereby it continually assesses surgical ward nurses to make sure that they adhere to the set standards of practice to ensure patient safety. The health professional body should also come up with a mechanism for dealing with those nurses who go against the set standards of practice. For example, a nurse who fails to use protective devices when handling a patient who has undergone an exposure-prone operation should be suspended for some months without payments (Cipher, 2006).

Environmental barriers to effective health care in the surgical ward include unsafe working environments, the primitive culture of people in the society, and a lack of adequate government policies to support health care. The clinical management team should employ adequate cleaning staff to make sure that high standards of hygiene are maintained in the surgical wards at all times to provide a clean working environment and to prevent infection of air-borne or other diseases among patients and nurses. The government should come up with awareness programs to create awareness among the people on the importance of seeking medical health care as most people in society still believe in traditional healers. The government should also come up with health care policies aimed at financing some of the clinical surgical operations which are expensive for both the patient and the hospital for quality health care to be accessible to all people regardless of their class (Running, 2006).

In conclusion, for effective health care to be provided to patients, the entire stakeholders need to be involved in the process. These stakeholders include the clinic, the nurses, the health professional body, the clinical management team, the government, the media, and the patients and their families. This means that the clinical management team should have proper planning, implementation, and evaluation process which allow for feedback from all the stakeholders involved.