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Best Practices Newsletter
How Well Prepared are You for the Challenges Facing Nurses in the 21st Century?
Posted on October 27, 2009 | Permalink
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How Well Prepared are You for the Challenges Facing Nurses in the 21st Century? By Kathy Quan, RN BSN PHN
As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the nursing profession begins to face a series of new and crucial issues. The population is aging and with the many technological advances in the past few decades they are an impatient group with a strong sense of entitlement that demands perfection and instant gratification.
As this population ages, it will require more health care and will indeed demand excellence. For a profession already pushed to the limits, this may become a challenge the likes of which no one is prepared to meet.
Here are a few examples of the challenges the nursing profession faces now and in the immediate future which will help to shape the focus of the coming decade.
1) The economic crisis has seemed to temporarily forestall the nursing shortage as many nurses who had retired or had reduced their employment to part time or very per diem status returned to a more active role.
However, the economy will recover and as it does, many of these nurses may begin to retire rapidly leaving employers in a lurch.
- How well prepared will your facility be to face this sudden exodus of nurses?
- What steps are in place to retain nursing staff?
2) Congress has long demanded improvements in quality and safety of patient care and in 2007 began to implement financial repercussions for failure to meet the needs. Medicare developed a list of Never Events.
Patients who require care for these errors must receive the care, but hospitals will not be reimbursed for the additional cost of this care. The list includes such medical errors as sponges or equipment left in a surgical site, and blood transfusion reactions due to an error involving the wrong blood type.
For the past two years, Medicare has been developing and implementing a growing list of HACs (hospital acquired conditions) for which hospitals will receive no reimbursement for the additional care required to treat these preventable conditions. Among the hospital acquired conditions on this list are such items as injury resulting from a fall in the hospital, urinary infection from a foley catheter, and pressure ulcers.
Following Medicare’s lead, Medicaid and private health insurances have instituted similar do not pay policies for the Never Events and HACs.
These issues can be avoided with basic good quality nursing care, but challenges such as the shortage of nurses and using increasing numbers of unlicensed personnel can affect even the best nursing care.
- What steps have your facility implemented to ensure Never Events and HACs are avoided?
- How much staff education has been presented to make staff aware of these issues?
- How can quality care be improved in the face of nursing shortages?
- Review the basic nursing care required to avoid these kinds of errors.
These are just a sampling of the challenges facing nurses in the 21st century. In our newest Toolkit, Nurses: Facing Challenges in the 21st Century: A Training Manual for Health Educators, we address these and other issues. We encourage nursing staff to use their critical thinking skills to assess the unique and individualized situations in their own facilities and help set strategic plans in motion to meet these challenges. In the process, nurses will learn to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses to improve their critical thinking and nursing process skills.
E-Zine Archives
- Medication Mix-Up: A Case Study (August 6, 2007)
- Always, always check out your assumptions about a patient’s well-being! (August 30, 2007)
- Communication with Patients: What a New Nurse Needs to Know! (October 10, 2007)
- Communication Skills: Leap and Bounce© (November 12, 2007)
- Poverty, Powerlessness and Healthcare (February 5, 2008)
- An Unresolved Conflict affects the Team (April 26, 2008)
- The Saga of my Fractured Meta-Carpal (August 9, 2008)
- The Nursing Shortage: Focus of PBS program, NOW (October 28, 2008)
- Is Nursing Really Recession-Proof? (February 21, 2009)
- Maintaining Empathy and Boundaries for Your Patients and Yourself (April 6, 2009)
- How Well Prepared are You for the Challenges Facing Nurses in the 21st Century? (October 27, 2009)