In recent years, the American health care delivery system has faced tremendous changes to deliver quality health care to Americans and find solutions for the emerging medical complications. America faces a high-aged population due to the increased life expectancy, poor lifestyles, and consumption of processed foods that have endangered American health and American lives (Giefer & Yantis, 2019). The government has laid down rules to promote good health for its citizens. The nursing fraternity being the one providing primary patient care has faced a transitional change in roles to enhance its services. For the nurses’ adequate training for the awaiting task, nursing education boards will review the curriculum to include advanced programs.
The Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act of 2019 is the most recent reform the government introduced to compact the health demands. The Act aims to change the Public Health Service Act to give room for the nursing curriculum’s advancement (Kopp, 2018). The Act serves to provide advanced programs in nursing training to help nurses acquire more competent skills. Under the Act, nurses’ training is funded objectively to: increase the number of skilled nurses and nurse educators and also to diversify the nursing workforce. Through the Act, the nurse’s roles and responsibilities shall increase to include some complex procedures initially done by other professionals.
The government’s goal is to provide quality health services, make healthcare affordable for all, and ensure healthcare costs match the quality of care provided. To ensure high-quality care, the government introduced quality measures. These are elements used to weigh the standard of care delivered to Americans by any healthcare organization; they are divided into structure measures, process measures, and outcome measures. Structural deals with the capabilities and the technologies used in care delivery, and process measures show the organization’s maintenance of health (Ball et al., 2017). Outcome measures talk about the results the patients receive from the care they received.
The government also introduced pay for performance, a scheme where medical professionals are paid based on their services, skills, and patient satisfaction. Though the pay for performance rule has enabled efficiency in care delivery, patients have suffered from undersupply of free care (Mendelson et al., 2017). The medical professionals have also adopted the fee for service. The pay for performance has therefore reinforced and deterred care delivery to the patient.
Nursing leadership and management are responsible for the senior nurses who delegate and oversee service delivery by the junior nursing staff. Mistakenly most people presume leadership’s role to be similar to management, but the two aspects differ in duty and qualifications. A nurse leader is responsible for nursing policies that promote nursing and patient care (Miles & Scott, 2019). The nurse manager, on the contrary, is responsible for the control and supervision of care delivery to the patient by the junior nurses.
Nurse leaders and managers have a core responsibility in spearheading nursing research and advanced practices in nursing. They have the educator role in ensuring that junior nurses offer quality care skillfully and competently and develop evidence-based improvements in care. They should interpret the research finding not only for qualified staff but also for nursing students by including them in nursing education. This way, the patient’s safe care is guaranteed, and quality nursing care is offered, facilitating the patient’s quick recovery.
The nursing fraternity has been facing a rapid transition and advancement rate in recent years. The changes result from the ever-advancing technology, the aging population, and federal laws making nursing evolve to meet the new set standards of care required. The major trends experienced in the nursing profession include demographic changes. The nursing career has changed from the female gender-based to being almost uniform in gender and racial aspects, including both male and female (Zangaro et al., 2018). Provision of leadership opportunities, unlike the ancient days whereby the nursing career was more of a robotic work in that the nurse only does as instructed without question. Nurses have recently been given a voice in making vital healthcare decisions. The emergency of ranks in nursing, including nurse leader, nurse manager, nurse in charge, and administrator, shows nurses’ respect.
Advancement in education is another emerging trend in the nursing field, as evidenced by the Title VIII Workforce Reauthorization Act of 2019. Its ultimate goal is to finance more competent nurses’ training by introducing new programs into the nursing curriculum. The nursing profession in five years is likely to be restructured in its role and responsibilities in care delivery. The nurses shall have the chance to deploy their skills in a completely different way.
It is evident that nursing plays a vital role in the striving to better healthcare services to the patient and citizens and is entirely dependable on the initiative. The reforms the federal legislation has put in place have made the nursing role take a different path as its roles are gradually changing (Díaz & Castilla, 2017). The nurses have to advance their academic level to meet the new standards and responsibilities.
References
Ball, J., Day, T., Murrells, T., Dall’Ora, C., Rafferty, A. M., Griffiths, P., & Maben, J. (2017). Cross-sectional examination of the association between shift length and hospital nurses job satisfaction and nurse reported quality measures. BMC Nursing, 16(1), 1-7.
Díaz, C. A., & Castilla, R. A. (2017). The future of nursing: Assumption of new roles and responsibilities. Journal of Community and Public Health Nursing, 3(1).
Giefer, C., & Yantis, K. (2019). The history of Title VIII funding at Pittsburg State University. The Midwest Quarterly, 60(3), 246-251.
Kopp, G. S. (2018). VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act – An update. AAACN Viewpoint, 40(6), 11-11.
Mendelson, A., Kondo, K., Damberg, C., Low, A., Motúapuaka, M., Freeman, M.,… & Kansagara, D. (2017). The effects of pay-for-performance programs on health, health care use, and processes of care: A systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine, 166(5), 341-353.
Miles, J. M., & Scott, E. S. (2019). A new leadership development model for nursing education. Journal of Professional Nursing, 35(1), 5-11.
Zangaro, G. A., Streeter, R., & Li, T. (2018). Trends in racial and ethnic demographics of the nursing workforce: 2000 to 2015. Nursing Outlook, 66(4), 365-371.