The Role of the Nurse in Patient Advocacy Research (Research Paper Sample)

The Role of the Nurse in Patient Advocacy
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Presently, the major challenges facing the healthcare sector are increasing patient acuity, nurse shortage, patient safety, high medical costs, and difficulties in integrating technology into the nursing practice (Hyun, et al., 2008). These challenges have a direct impact on patient access to healthcare services, quality of care, and length of hospital stay. As a nurse advocate for patients’ best interests, my advocacy campaigns will focus on the areas that are integral to patient safety and better patient outcomes, such as promoting adoption of technology and quality patient care as a means of improving safety, reducing readmission cases, and shortening the length of hospital stay, respectively.
Given the opportunity, one organization I would develop to advocate for the public is the Nurse Development Forum whose primary objective is to improve nurse competencies in the area of nursing informatics. Developing nurses’ skills in nursing informatics will facilitate effective adoption and implementation of new technologies, which will play an important role in improving quality of care, patient safety and patient outcomes (Darvish, et al., 2014). Thus, it is necessary to improve nurses’ knowledge and competencies in the use of computerized systems to deliver services to consumers.
Integration of modern technologies into nursing presents a good opportunity to improve patient safety by eliminating physician care. However, this process has been slowed down due to the conflict of interest among different stakeholders in the healthcare sector. Nurses, vendors, insurance companies, and hospitals all have vested interests in the adoption of modern technologies due to its impact on job security, profits, and costs. Technology is bad news for workers in any industry because besides improving quality, it also provides a cheaper and more efficient alternative to human labor (Rouleau, Gagnon, & Cote, 2015). Consequently, technology has become a subject of controversy and conflict between employers and workers since its adoption opens the door for retrenchment of non-skilled labor and reduction of the labor force to take advantage of technology. In the nursing profession, adoption modern technologies such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs) not only threatens the job security of older nurses who are not equipped to use computerized systems, but may also become redundant. Consequently, it is only natural that nursing unions can oppose the adoption of some technologies to protect the job security of members. However, this opposition derails efforts by healthcare givers and governments to facilitate quick service delivery, improve the quality of care, and promote positive patient outcomes.
In response to this challenge, my advocacy will focus on pushing for the adoption of nurse retraining programs by governments to create a technologically-prepared nursing workforce to drive the implementation of technology in the nursing profession. At conflict in this case are the interests of technology vendors, hospitals, and nurses. Technology vendors often design technological solutions to healthcare challenges without involving the people who are intended to use them- nurses. The primary motive of these vendors is profits, which sometimes encourages secrecy during the research and development phases, as well as the patenting of the technologies, which prevents the possibility of modifications by third parties to make them compatible with existing technology and more user-friendly. As a result, hospitals and nurses are faced with a situation whereby vendors lobby for the adoption of a technology that requires retraining of nurses or discontinuation of existing technologies due to incompatibility.
The purpose of any new technology is to improve current practices and promote quality of service delivery. In the healthcare sector, new technologies must be designed with their usability and impact on patient outcome in mind. Accordingly, vendors must collaborate with nurses and hospitals to ensure that new technologies designed for use in the healthcare sector are easy to use by nurses and have a direct, positive impact on patient outcome. Towards this goal, my advocacy will focus on compelling vendors to implement pilot projects and involve nursing professionals in designing phase. These collaborative efforts will ensure that new technologies are better understood by nurses, who play a critical role in their adoption and implementation.
By involving nursing professionals in the designing and implementation of new technologies, healthcare givers will stand a better chance of improving patient safety by ensuring that nurses can use computerized systems effectively. This will in turn accelerate the digitization of information access and sharing, which will greatly improve patient safety and outcome, especially during emergency situations. For instance, the use of Electronic Health Records will reduce the time it takes to admit and treat unconscious accident victims since nurses will be able to quickly access patient information such as blood type, existing conditions, and previous treatment history. Shortening the time it takes to admit patients will promote positive patient outcomes by allowing nurses to attend to patients quickly, which will prove vital in saving lives.
My second advocacy policy will be on enforcing the adoption of Electronic Health Records and post-discharge follow ups to avoid physician errors and reduce readmission cases. Advocating for post-discharge follow ups will reduce readmission cases by allowing physicians the opportunity to monitor patient progress and detect new complications. The adoption of electronic health records continues to face resistance due to its implication of nurses’ job security and privacy of patient information (Ajami, 2013). In regards to privacy of patient information, electronic storage of patients’ medical history will make sensitive information easily accessible to third parties such as insurance companies, who will then charge higher premiums or deny coverage to patients with higher risks to chronic conditions such as cancer and heart disease. Secondly, employers can deny individuals job opportunities because they are likely to suffer from health conditions that will require costly health benefits. Thus, the opposition to the adoption of innovative technologies such as EHRs is partly intended to protect healthcare consumers from potential discrimination by employers and insurance companies. In this regard, my advocacy campaign will focus on...