Nursing Course Work Example: Nurses as Agents of Change

Nurses are the most important professional people in the entire health sector and the world as a whole. A few ignorant people would disagree about this, but it is a fact that the roles played by the nurses are so essential and can never be replaced by any other professional. The central role of the nursing career is to bring the desired change in the medical sector. Their operation involves monitoring the healing process of the patients after the doctors or the physicians have administered the correct medication. The administered medication might either work or fail to work, in either case, it is the duty of the nurses to document what happens based on the conditions under which the patients are placed. The nurses deal with a wide variety of patients including the palliative patients, those with terminal illnesses and patients with short term diseases. In all these conditions. The role of nurses makes them be the largest in number in the health care sectors in most countries of the world. I believe nurses act as the agents of change in disease management in the health care to promote the healing process. Being agents of change is a heavy duty that requires the nurses to be in a constant good relationship with all stakeholders in the health department. Moreover, the noble duty of initiating changes requires the nurses to be well informed, alert and innovative to have the best current ideas that can transform the nursing sector for decades and be built to other much better ideas.

Diagnosis of The Problem

The greatest challenge to the health care systems is to ensure continuous improvement of the patients after they have received medication. More often, patients come to the hospitals, and they are diagnosed with various diseases. The physician would prescribe the correct treatment based on the condition of the patient and their history of illness. Factors such as age, sex, the severity of the disease, body condition and diet of the patients would influence the drugs they are given as a prescription. How first the patient recover, however, is influenced by a variety of unrelated factors. The healing process is the most important after diagnosis. Most conditions in the hospital would require the patients to be kept under some condition. To put this into perspective, the environment the patients stay in during the healing process determine how first they get to recover irrespective of the drugs they receive or body conditions. One key issue about the patients environment is drug compliance (Grabowski, etal, 2014). The patients who stay away from their caregiver more often fail to comply with the drugs dosages given by the physicians. Drugs compliance is a psychological issue. For instance, a patient who is receiving medication while at home would most likely forget to take all the medication as prescribed maybe because they just forgot or because they feel they have recovered. Sometimes the patients would fail to take the drugs because they fear the bitterness or the pain of the injection. The repercussions of this would have serious negative impacts on the health and recovery process of the patients. Mostly, it results into reoccurrence or relapse of the disease. The impacts of relapse would be negative both to the health and the pocket of the patients or their family (Hobbie, 2004).

The environment is also critical regarding the hygienic conditions. Most diseases require patients to stay in special environments for their recovery. The kind of environment required is mostly attainable in a hospital setting. When the patients are discharged, most of them find them in a pathetic environment that does not promote recovery. The special environments are usually needed for the people with terminal illnesses, the aged and the young children. The environment back at home never offers a good environment for the healing of these groups of people. The best place for recovery of these groups of people is always at the hospital. However, due to the challenges of high hospital bills which is most time unaffordable to most people in the society. These people must always get discharged to receive treatment while at home. Their recovery process is thus left at the mercy of the home conditions and their willingness to take drugs (Grossman & Valiga, 2016).

Moreover, these patients face the challenge of being discharged before full recovery because of the insufficient bed space that sometimes arises. The issue of bed space in the hospital wards is very biting in the entire world. Sometimes, overcrowding in the hospitals cannot be managed through the work of having more space is dependent on the government. Overcrowding more often makes the hygienic conditions in the wards pathetic. Well, these are the moments when hospitals have been considered to be the worst place to have a patient. In fact, there are cases of patients who have been reported to worsen in their conditions immediately after being admitted to the hospitals (Grabowski, etal, 2014).

Potential Solutions

One of the urgent challenges in the caregiving process that must be handled immediately worldwide is the issue of overcrowding in the hospital. While this is an issue that predominantly lies in the docket of the government, nurses play a key role in ensuring its implementation. As a gents of change nurses play a critical role in ensuring the government plays its role. They must give an accurate record of the reality of the challenges they face because of the limited bed space in their health facility. Through their leaders, they have to communicate this challenge and indicate the required number of the bed space to solve this problem. By doing so, they act as agents of change by speaking on behalf of the patients (Lonadier, 2016).

Another key way by which nurses could function to bring change in the hospital sector is by struggling to reduce the rate of the readmission of the patients. The high-risk patients and the elderly usually have a high frequency of being re-admitted to the hospitals. These patients require special care to ensure that they do not fall into relapse after leaving the hospital. The idea of palliative care is one of the greatest innovation the nurses have come up with to take care of the old and the terminally ill patients. The palliative care unit takes care of these patients up to a point when they can leave the hospital and live without being monitored. The palliative care unit innovation prevents them from being taken care of by their family members who lack experience on how to handle patients during the healing process (Morton et al., 2017).

Moreover, nurses can reduce the hospital readmissions by coming up with various models that facility disease monitoring and quick healing process. An example of such models was created by the nurses at the University of Pennsylvania. These nurses came up with an intensive transitional care model for the patients. This is a model that describes that nurses should do follow up on the patients for about three or more months. During this period, the patients should and must go for regular checkups at the hospitals. The patients would, therefore, be able to receive good care even after leaving the hospitals. The progression of their healing process would be attributed to the nurses. This is a great step to the realization of change in the health care system (Pratt, & Wood, 2015).

As agents of change, nurses play a very critical role of profiling the data of the patients. The profiles of the patients are useful for future references. It is well understood that the best way to treat someone sometimes involves looking at the history of the diseases. Moreover, details concerning all the medications that have been received by the patients are kept. This process would aid in understanding the patients before they can be given medication. The wrong prescription is a leading cause of death. The agents of change would in this case help to solve this great headache in health care settings (Moorhead et al., 2014).

Implementation Plan for The Proposed Changes

The implementation process of the discussed changes is the most important and difficult. It is important in the sense that it will ensure great revolution in the hospital setting in the entire world. The implantation process is very difficult in the sense that it requires so many stakeholders to make it a reality. For instance, the government would play a very critical role in the implementation of the plans because the financial burden would lie mostly on their basket. Moreover, the hospital setting is very complex because of the different personnel that is found in this kind of an environment (Shamian, & Edgar, 1987).

The implementation process of the palliative unit is the most difficult. This unit is meant to take care of the patients with terminal illness. Currently, some of the diseases considered in this category include cancer. This unit should also take care of the old in the society. The old are considered in this category because their response to drugs is somehow very poor. They need special diet and conditions to be able to improve their conditions. The implementation process should be stepwise (Kearney-Nunnery, 2015).

The first step in the implementation of this program is the analysis of the profiles of the group of people who would benefit from this program within a locality. For instance, within a region of ten thousand square kilometers, the bio-data of all these patients would be taken and their details and statistics documented. Moreover, the data of similar patients in the past ten years would be analyzed to determine the average percentage increase in this group of people. These data would be obtained from records kept in the nursing department visited by these people (Marshall et al., 2012).

After that, the results obtained would be used to data appropriate regional budget for construction of palliative care unit within a region. The constructive would be done such that space can accommodate the current population and the five-year plan projection. This budget would be present to non-governmental organizations and the government through its health department for funding. The funds would be obtained from these sources because hospitals are non-profit organizations. It is also important to provide an estimate of the required staffing for the smooth running of the plan. If a very country through its nursing department would adopt this strategy, then definitely a lot of changes would be observed that would have the net effect of improving the health care system thus reducing the nations annual mortality rate (Lehne, &Rosenthal, 2014).

The plan to implement the transitional health care model must be one of the most concrete within a hospital setting. The major stakeholders involved in this plan would include mainly the people under the hospital setting who get a chance to interact on a daily basis with the patients. In this scheme, every nurse is first assigned to specified patients who he takes care of until they reach full recovery (Shanley, 2007). The model dictates that the patient recovery process should and must be monitored after they have left the hospital environment. Every care giver is therefore assigned a manageable number of patients and told to care for them until they fully recover. During this period, any side effects of the drugs, psychological conditions that affect the patients and many other health conditions are recorded. This model could be combined with the palliative care unit plan to have a more concrete plan of managing the patients. By doing so, the old patients and the patients with terminal illnesses are discharged from the hospitals and taken to the palliative unit. This is done mainly after they have been administered with the suitable medication. In this unit,...