· Respond by extending, refuting/correcting, or adding additional nuance to their posts. Cited in current APA style with support from 2 academic sources.
· All replies must be constructive and use literature where possible.
Silva Santiago Ranauro, Kelli Cristina Dutra
Nursing & Health Care-Policy
Kelli Dutra Ranauro
Saint Thomas University
NUR 506 -AP3 Influencing Health Policy
Dr. Guelsy Diaz
January-20,2022
Advocacy In Nursing Practice
Advocacy is central to nursing practice as it enables nurses to fight for themselves and for the patients they are taking care of. Multiple types of advocacy exist and they occur at different levels. These include patient advocacy, advocacy for a better workplace, administrative advocacy, and policy advocacy. At my workplace, I have mostly encountered advocacy for a better workplace environment and patient advocacy.
Patient Advocacy
Nurses play a vital role in advocating for patients whom they take care of. For instance, I noted an occasion when the nurse in charge had to advocate for better patient care in our facility by reducing the waiting time and ensuring all the patients are treated equally without discrimination based on their background or socioeconomic status. Other forms of patient advocacy exist in which nurses play a key role. For example, nurses advocate for ethical nursing practice ensuring no harm happens to any patient, the patient receives all the necessary medications promptly, and that no errors occur in drug administration’s hence patient safety (Abbasinia, et al., 2020).
In addition, nurses advocate for financial and social assistance to patients in need hence ensuring they receive the required medications without suffering catastrophic health burdens which can affect their normal family needs. Some of these include advocating for social insurance schemes, helping waiver patients who can’t pay hospital fees, and running campaigns to help raise funds for the patients. Not to forget, nurses who ran blood donation campaigns are aimed at getting the blood for patients in need of blood in hospitals all over the country.
Nurses frequently create time to listen to patients, hear about their needs and their worries while also providing the necessary information to ensure patients make an informed decision on their medications and the mode of treatment. All this contribute so much to better patient welfare hence better health outcome.
Advocacy at Work Place
Nurses are prone to be taken advantage of, working in poor conditions with no safety equipment. Some often even use their resources to help meet the patient needs in the hospitals. Burnout is a common phenomenon and it affects overall patient care. Nurses have taken the forefront in advocating for a better workplace environment, increase in the ratio of nurses to the patient, increase in the equipment and protections gears in the hospital especially during this covid 19 period (Dossey et al .,2019. And these have yielded better outcomes, especially in the hospitals with better policies to cover nurses and protect them in case they contact diseases such as covid 19 at the workplace. Furthermore, an increase in nurses and nursing teaching facilities secondary to advocacy has reduced the burn out enabling nurses to take off the fewer patients which increases their efficiency while providing care.
In conclusion, it is important to note that nurses have seen the importance of being vocal especially in advocating for their rights and for the rights of the patients they take care of. With this, there is continuous improvement in health care hence better patient satisfaction to care.
References
Abbasinia, M., Ahmadi, F., & Kazemnejad, A. (2020). Patient advocacy in nursing: A concept analysis. Nursing Ethics, 27(1), 141-151.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0969733019832950 (Links to an external site.)
Dossey, B. M., Rosa, W. E., & Beck, D. M. (2019). Nursing and the sustainable development goals: from Nightingale to now. AJN The American Journal of Nursing, 119(5), 44-49. DOI: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000557912.35398.8f
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