The Role of the Nurse in Hospitals
The interview was conducted on a patient who had an accident and was recuperating at one of the general hospitals. The hospital had a private wing but I opted to carry out my research on public wing to find out the role of nurses and the quality of care they give in uncontrolled environment.
The patient believed that nurses work for the hospital but doctors for themselves. He took the side of the nurse because many times he has seen nurses take the extra step to make a patient be more comfortable and at ease. Registered nurses irrespective of their specialty and work setting, perform basic duties such as treating patients, providing emotional support and advice to patients’ family members. Nurses educate the public and patients on various medical conditions. Nurses perform diagnostic tests, analyze results, administer treatment, and operate medical machinery and record patients’ medical symptoms/histories for the following up and further rehabilitations (Richard et al, 1996). According to the patient interviewed, nurses are the patient’s advocates since they bring compassion and comfort to the patient together with a high level care to a population that ha been underserved by the physicians.
Research done on the particular concept also found out that nurses’ ability to order tests, treat tests and diagnose illness is equal to that of primary caregivers such as physicians (Karb & Kaylor, 2009). Nurses are first hand caregivers because they spend more time with patients during routine office visits that other physicians or doctors. They are at a position of talking and discussing preventive health measures to patients. As human population increases so is hospital face increasing the demand to operate in a range of quality improvement action. Likewise, the influence and role of nurses is also increasing in these efforts (Richard et al, 1996).
Hospitals also encourage good performance from nurses because of the set organizational cultures that improve quality of nurses’ roles in their activities.The Quality of Care Received from the Nurse As quality caregivers, nurses engage in difficulties at all levels from the growing demand to participate in quality improvement activities. The quality of the care they provide is evident from the burdensome nature of data they are collecting and reporting. As key caregiverrs in hospitals, nurses considerably control the quality of care given and treatment experiences provided in hospitals. Accordingly, nurses’ high quality patient care is dependent on the ability to engage nursing resources effectively as resources continue to be increasingly limited (Wadsworth & Thompson, 2005).Nurses frequently are the unsung heroes of the medical field.
They are adaptable and well-educated. They provide much of the hands on to patients. Good nurses are caring, empathetic, and compassionate in their work so as to give patients the best care. Nurses should be responsible and detail-oriented since their duties necessitate accurate record keeping. Their responsibility lies on the fact that they are required to work with expensive medical equipment and potent drugs (Ennett & Federman, 1999). Emotionally, the patient said that nurses should be stable since they are faced with different kinds of emergencies, distressed families, difficult situations and all kinds of sick people.
A good nurse should also be able to play the role of an advocate to a patient. Current job profession needs nurses who are able to perform surgery, diagnoses, patient care, treatment and referrals.
