Beliefs and Practices of Registered Nurses - Essay Example

Many issues have made it necessary that all stakeholders in the nursing fraternity should seek to be active when it comes to developing health regulations and policies. This is contrary to the existing scenario in which government policymakers and not healthcare professionals are developing them.

With the increasingly complex landscape of patient care, it is the role of the nurses and nurse leaders to devise measures of providing the required care. This is because nurses are the healthcare professionals who execute all the roles required to foster faster and better recovery of patients. Additionally, they spend the most time beside patients’ beds. One of the major ways of addressing this is by implementing the all-around foci as taught in nursing school that ranges from preventive care, patient communication, improving efficiency, cost containment, and more importantly, preventing relapse and costly returns to healthcare institutions by the patients. In a nutshell, the nurse can only be able to implement such if they become active in developing health policies and regulations since they understand the patient’s needs and welfare more than do the federal and state bodies. The landscape of patient care is expanding and varying rapidly, and efficient strategies such as those mentioned can only be identified and customized for the good of patients if healthcare professionals are allowed the necessary support and freedom.

Nurses should take up the challenge of being politically active because it is a sacrifice required to bring a better healthcare system into existence. Political skills are required in addition to energy, time, will, and resources of power. One way to become politically active is by providing first-person perspectives on matters of healthcare by highlighting the impacts that certain regulations, bills, or decisions are bound to affect the healthcare fraternity. This includes patients and nurses. To be able to provide such perspectives, one should conduct sufficient research on the matters at hand so that they are armed with the facts bound to make their suggestions considerable. Second, nurses should get involved in campaigns that advocate for certain related issues and throw their support behind them to gather their voices and power. For example, calling for unity amongst fellow nurses and professionals and achieving the numbers is one way of communicating and making demands known. Finally, nurses can also run for political offices (Lundy, et.al, 2014).

Becoming a political advocate nurse, however, comes with challenges that need to be addressed before the above strategy can be successful. First of all, since nurses are ever busy with patients, time constraints emerge as the first challenge that would cripple the process. Second, most nurses lack knowledge in understanding of the complexity of political processes. This barrier makes most of them remain politically inactive. Third, owing to their rank in healthcare organizations as well as the gap between nursing and politics, nurses feel powerless. This also renders them politically inactive (Avolio, 2014). Therefore, for nurses to become politically active and contribute to developing policies and regulations, the above barriers need to be fully addressed. Read More