Regulations That Are There In The Nursing Professionalism (Essay Sample)

Importance of regulation in Nursing
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Nurses in Australia are members of a professional body, Discuss the importance of regulations and why rules are necessary for nursing
Introduction
Nursing is a profession that requires trust from different parties, which include the patient’s families and the community at large. This is because the profession deals with managing a life through taking care of the sick and ailing giving them the attention they deserve and even taking them through the recovery process (Chin,2008). Nursing in Australia is regulated by the Australia Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) under the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA). The board has stipulated codes of professional standards that nurses have to comply with at work as they execute their duties. This code of standards has a comprehensive coverage that ranges from the required codes of conduct. It also stipulates nurse’s professional standards related to their work ethics this is the minimum ethical requirements required of all nurses as they perform their duties. Thirdly it provides the required boundaries of the functions and responsibilities of a nurse. The Clear scope is so as to avoid nurses masquerading as medical doctors and performing duties they are not qualified to handle, (Lundy, 2014).Finally, the required standard practices nurses should abide by and competencies that they should have met to practice nursing, this include entry into practice. This document explores the importance of regulation in the nursing profession in Australia and why such regulations are in place in the nursing profession.
Importance of regulations
Due to the existence of rules and regulations in the nursing profession in Australia, the profession has earned a goodwill from the public, According to the Roy Morgan polls of April 2015, 92% of Australians aged over 14 years have rated nurses as the most ethical and honest professions in the land for the last twenty-one years in a row. There is a need to have professional standards in the field of nursing because these rules describe the require competence levels required in the dispensation of care at each and every phase of the nursing process. Without a set level of expertise to be complied to, nurses will not have a general guide to the right practice in the profession. And this may lead to mistrust by patients and community and even abuse by the professionals, i.e., if a nurse is supposed to work under the supervision of a doctor under a particular situation then it has to be abided to such that no other nurses operate without the monitoring of a doctor is a similar situation. Professional standards are designed to reflect the desired and wish to be achieved levels of performance (Taylor et al., 2011), this is assumed the best and optimal satisfaction required model levels. These set levels can be used to measure and compare the actual performance of nurses and the desired standards, and this is very instrumental in measuring the performance of the nurses. If nurses can strive to achieve these set standards, then it will be assumed that the practice has reached optimal operational levels that can be attested to be the very great levels.
Professional standards also promote and give guidance on clinical practices thus guiding the nursing practitioners on the best practice and accepted practices within the profession at local and international levels giving the professional a universality look. Nursing is all about life care giving and can be done to anyone from whichever part of the globe hence nursing has to have universal accepted clinical practices that are applicable universally under different contexts of culture and environment (Lundy, 2014).Nurses should be able to provide services that are vital to the community within the various forms of diversity and pluralism in the community in a bid to optimize wellbeing. The Australia Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) under the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA), provides a frame work of rules with regards to discrimination, offences and conflict of interest to ensure that nurses dispense their mandate ethically. Like in any other professional field of work, nurses have to be evaluated to see if they are compliant with the set standards of work.
In an account to ensure there is the best service provision within the profession, there should be a set of a level of competencies to be attained by all players in the profession. This set level of skills also acts as the framework for developing the various clinical required skills. And thus, act at the checklist of items to be fulfilled or meet by the practitioners in a bid to provide quality services to the patients and the community as a whole (Philip & Beatrice, 2003).
Professional standards also bring about uniformity in service delivery, consistency regarding service dispensation practices as well as competencies required to and during career practice. As a professional field, it is expected that a nurse in Melbourne and a nurse in Miami can perform a similar work duty in a similar manner since all are trained in a universal way of how to handle that particular task. (Egenes, 2009) Noted that in a professional observing work scenario all operations follow a prescribed order of tasks that are universally accepted within the profession. The Australia Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) under the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) provides regulations on registration of new, students and handles overseas nurses practicing in Australia to see they have met the required accreditations and standards to avoid boundary violation in practice.
Nursing as a profession deals with care giving in situations that are life threatening (Alligood,2013). Sometimes the nurses find themselves in situation of making crucial decisions in the life of the sick or ailing, to ensure that a standard of best practice is reached on this decisions the professional standards act as a guide to how best, the nurse can make the decisions to assist, and mostly these professional standards hold the decision maker responsible and accountable for the clinical decision and action that the practitioner takes so as to ensure they take the very prudent decisions to the best interest of the wellbeing of the patient as per the Health Resources and Services Administration (September 2010). This explains why a nurse has to work under the instruction of a medical doctor. A senior staff makes the most difficult decisions for the patients, as the medical interns are not supposed to work or make any decision for patients without the supervision of a practicing medical staff.
As caregiver’s nurses have to maintain a high level of professionalism that will ensure that they are trusted and respected for their contribution to the society. To maintain the required levels of professionalism, there has to be some set guidelines of professional standards to be maintained and by abiding this specification the patients and the community as a whole will trust and respect the nurses and the profession as a whole. The Australia Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) under the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA), has developed regulations to ensure high moral and ethical standards among nurses i.e., the laws on informed consent, national law breach regulations to ensure the levels of professionalism are excellent.
Why regulations in nursing industry
Draper et al., 2011, noted that the principle reason for professional standards is the nursing field is to direct and maintain safe standards and clinical competent nursing practices. A nursing profession not only in Australia is it risky and involves giving care to the sick and ailing, care giving means maintaining high levels of safety to avoid infection as well as a treat to cure the condition. Some of the patients suffer from communicable diseases which put the nurse at a high risk of getting infected. This should however not make the nurses provide poor services to the patient as during training they are taught on the safety measures to take to avoid getting infected and at the same time improve the patient condition without putting any one at any risk. The professional working standards ensure that there is next to nil chance of any disease spread.
In any profession, there are continuous checks to ensure improvement. In the nursing profession due to its fragility, professional standards are necessary to ensure that areas of improvement are detected, and improvement can be made in either the clinical service provision or workplace safety so as to ensure...