Why the Role of Nurses Is Important in Healthcare

A nurse helps you recover, encouraging and protecting you – someone ready to care for the sick, injured, and elderly. Nursing is beginning to be understood globally as a discipline with a recognizable program of action and is independent of other fields related to health care providers.

Some understand it as a profession, some as a scientific discipline. More moderate people say that it is a profession that will finally get its legitimate status. For those who follow nursing and its development during the 20th century, efforts to enrich it with knowledge from other scientific disciplines are only a logical continuation of the history of medicine and the process of healthcare itself.

Being a nurse brings out the most beautiful thing in a human being – humanity and devotion to the vocation. The field of services they offer is vast. Nurses play an essential role when teaching children to wash their hands or adults to maintain health. Moreover, they are expected to manage highly sophisticated medical technology that can preserve human life.

From Humble Beginnings to an Increasing Role

Nurses make up more than a third of all healthcare workers. According to the conducted analysis, this type of care represents more than 70% of all procedures with the patient during hospital treatment. Social recognition of professional caretaking was a long process of establishing and defining professional autonomy.

As we know it today, nursing began to develop only in the 19th century. The beginning was associated with Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), who saw it as a self-defined moral practice aimed at nurturing. She was a pioneer of professional education and their most excellent model. She is the originator of the idea and the founder of the Red Cross. Until the end of her life, Nightingale advocated for progress and women’s rights. Regardless of her actions, it took some time to develop nursing as a calling with well-deserved respect.

This was significantly influenced by the development of theories in the 1960s and a more precise definition of education’s role and development. A significant impetus for developing their ideas of caretaking occurred in 1962. The United States government financially supported a scientific training program and enabled the acquisition of a doctorate in this field. In the present day advanced nursing education is becoming a part of every medical facility. This allows the nurse to perform more complicated tasks and manage the patients more independently.

Initially, it was often disputed and marginalized medical activity that emerged into the full recognition. The service’s independence culminated in the 1980s, with due regard for previous historical contributions. Accordingly, the nurses have managed to get through different theories and conceptual models.

New Approach to the Current State of Things

Recent nursing-related theories emphasize that the nurses’ role is related to the care of the sick, disease prevention, and public health promotion. The new holistic and systematic approach is focused on the individual, a family, and communities. The scope of nurses’ activity is extensive, from specific and demanding care, patient advocacy, and promotional advice to highly sophisticated medical technology. All of the abovementioned responsibilities are analyzed in the essay samples on nursing from Studydriver with the great examples of selflessness the profession brings. Moreover, nurses/technicians often encounter the provision of services that involve a high risk to the patients but also a high-risk level to their health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the world will need nine million nurses and midwives by 2030. They are often the first and the only health professionals that patients see. Therefore, the quality of their work in the treatment process is more than necessary. They are part of the local community by sharing their culture, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Thus, they can shape and provide effective interventions to meet the needs of patients, families, and communities.

Nurses’ position largely depends on the current environment. For example, in 2021, they professionally, dedicatedly, and with superhuman efforts engaged in helping the sick in this pandemic that took human lives. Working as a team, their expertise and care has made an invaluable contribution. They came out of this professionally even more experienced to deal with their duties’ new challenges. On the other hand, as human beings, both male and female caregivers have passed a great test in the age of the pandemic, which changed the world.

The Future of Modern Nursing

Great responsibility, the need to react quickly, daily dealing with death, and human suffering are excellent sources of stress. Healthcare workers are exposed to numerous stresses. A big number of patients, complex or demanding ones, lack of health workers, and working in shifts minimizes the satisfaction of nurses who want to do their job professionally.

According to the advocates, problems are most visible in the lack of education and the inability to advance.

Conditionally speaking, many nurses’ professional training was gained through their own experience and enthusiasm through work. However, nurses cannot express themselves as persons with expertise in specialized healthcare institutions acquired within higher education. A possible solution would be the online distribution of relevant information, a public base of knowledge, and experience sharing with doctors.

Conclusion

The future of this career depends mostly on well-trained and educated nurses who will gain more knowledge through staff training and creating an independent policy and research. The higher education program for nurses should be continuously developed according to international standards. Such individuals are professionally trained to make critical clinical decisions and independently perform their duties. Also, the open possibility of specializations in neonatology, emergency medicine, gerontology, and psychiatry gives nurses the legal right to be independent in performing professional duties.