Political Activism in Nursing Research Paper

Political Activism in Nursing

There exists a dire need and urgency for a change in political and legislative advocacy in health care system. It has been observed that most of the female health care workers including nurses are facing problems with the existing system. This calls for development of political skills to bring forward changes in the system. Policy makers should understand the importance of nurses and pursue the cause of bringing positive changes. It needs no emphasis that information of health care policies, there must be active involvement of healthcare workers as their participation plays crucial role in future development of health care system. Policy makers should be varying of the fact that healthcare workers are main stakeholders and their concerns should be taken care at the time of formulation of respective policies.

It is an established fact that workplace environment and heath care system policies have great impact over nurse's life so there is need of law that doesn't create any negative impact on the quality of their professional life. It can only be possible when nurses involve themselves in the development of workplace and health care policies.

Nurse to Patient Ratio

Nurse to patient ratio affects on both patient outcomes as well as on nurses job satisfaction. It's the responsibility of policy makers and health care legislators to improve the patient safety and nursing conditions in the hospitals. To improve the nursing conditions and patient safety there is a need of increase in supply of nurses or to improve the nurse to patient ratio. This arrangement would ease out the workload on nurses thus it would improve their productivity. In order to provide best services to patient, optimum level of nursing staff is required. There is also need of improving the skills of nurses because it plays a critical role in the patient outcomes. If any hospital has shortage of nurses then it creates challenge for hospital to change the number and mix of nursing staff (Inouye).Researches have been conducted on the subject but the optimal nurse to patient ratio is yet to be established. Nevertheless it has been found that patient outcomes can be increased through this arrangement. In order to make the reform successful hospitals, nurses, government and doctors must work together.

According to the survey of MNA, the main reason of increasing serious medical complication and patient deaths is the insufficient nursing care. It is practically impossible for any nurse to take care of too many patients at one time. It is also proved by the research that lower nursing staff increases the risk of post operative infections, longer hospital stay as well as the risk of death. It is also correct that there are other factors that increase these kinds of risks like hospital management, unavailability of medical equipment, lack of supporting staff but among all these factors the most important and the most affected one is insufficient nursing staff. All these results prove the influence of nursing staff performance on the patient outcomes. Emancipation of nurses through eased out workload will certainly reduce the risk of adverse outcomes like infections etc. The nurses with minimal stress level can take better care of patients since main contributor for increment of stress is the increased in workload.

Primarily profit orientation is the main hurdle in improving upon the number of nurses. Increased number of nurses for the same number of patient means increased expenditure without increase in profits.. Majority of the hospitals are operating at a deficit and they can't afford to hire more nurses. But the fact is that the hospitals are also facing the cost adverse outcomes and because of increased workload, the turnover rate of nurses is high. By hiring more nurses, hospitals can have more nurses at a time and thus reducing workload of nurses would….....