Nursing’s Future: What Is the Message?

As soon as the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) had issued their report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health in 2010, the nursing business and the complete healthcare sector were confronted. This statement identified 43 far-reaching proposals for improvement that intersect nursing practice, medical education, labor force planning, strategy making, expertise, quality improvement, and patient well-being.

It is not a surprise that the national feedback to the declaration under the title The Future of Nursing has been quite powerful and expected during the performance of proficient orders. The Tri-Council for Nursing deeply supported the report, which recognized the imperative function of nurses in healthcare restructuring, and hailed teamwork among shareholders to promote report’s references. On the contrary, the American Medical Association retorted back to the report by accentuating on the disparity in educational requisites of nurses against doctors, underlining the significance of physician-directed care teams, and noting that imposing greater liability on nurses was not a response to doctors’ deficiency in the United States.

Profound discontent with the limited role of nurses does not only reside in the restrictions and the spectrum of practice, but also in expertise resistance to the developed roles, the disintegration of the entire healthcare system, and obsolete insurance regulations and tactics. With no interference, obstacles has been growing to disrupt the general conversion stratagem of the healthcare structure. Nurses are believed to be undermined and not given the absolute value and standing, which they deserve. They should become full affiliates, in the same way as physicians and other proficient healthcare bodies, underscoring the substantial essence of collaboration and innovation in the restructuring process. In turn, nurses should promote and develop their skills, especially leadership and managerial ones, in order for them to be able to acquire a more robust folder, which complies with the standards of the regulated healthcare restructure, surpassing the past burdens, negative perceptions, and biases. The latter linked nurses with lesser or more accessory roles of employees, who responded to the guidelines of others.

Technology is another factor that plays a key role in healthcare reorganization and the revolution of nursing in the form of information technology. The decisive meaning of using concurrent data to notify and forecast changes in the nursing labor force, education, and practice throughout varied milieu was lately highlighted. Additionally, being caregivers at the bedside, nurses should be allocated as forefront decision-makers, who plan, expand, acquire, apply, and assess information technology that backs up nursing choices and care facility. This kind of technology participation gives nurses a status of those, who really outline decisions and strategies, instead of merely playing a more inert role with partial or trivial power (Johnson, Malast, Mastro, Moran, Mulligan, Smith, & Veneziano, 2012).

Still, among many comprehended actual obstacles, there is a scarcity of nurses and nursing staff, an aging vacation, governmental and political setbacks to complete practice, and less than the perfect anticipation of individual possibilities as leaders and change precursors. There are further urging signs of improvement. RWJF’s head newly quoted a number of educational establishments that are exploiting original approaches to assist their nurses in developing to obtain BSN and higher degrees. She states that attainment relies on such transformations becoming a state standard instead of being an exemption.