to head in new directions
The nursing profession has been long neglected and often ignored. But that’s about to change as nursing becomes an important piece of delivering better health care.
This new report underscores the importance of nursing as an essential component of the health care profession. Nurses are crucial in preventing medication errors, reducing rates of infection and successfully facilitating a patient’s return to health, not to mention delivering health care that may have been handled in previous times by a physician.
But it will take planning to bring nursing into this new age. It will require an emphasis on higher levels of education and more training. Physicians must embrace the idea that nurses are their full partners in a redesigned health care system in the United States.
Among the problems to fix:
- The federal government needs to develop a nationwide best practices model.
- Scope-of-practice barriers must be eliminated
- Better training for nurses must be provided so they can have a key role in a patient-centered health care system.
- A high turnover rates among newly graduated nurses means learning how to manage the transition from school to practice.
Along with the urgency to retool the profession, the need for a diverse workforce for a diverse society is acute and most urgent.
-Afaf I. Meleis, Dean University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
Read more about the Initiative on the Future of Nursing
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