The nursing profession revolves around caring for the sick and other clinical duties that contribute to promoting health and the prevention of diseases. Nurses have been among the frontline workers charged with ensuring improved health and well-being of the public and overall patient outcomes. In other words, these professionals intersect health and societies, indicating their indispensable part in addressing various social determinants of health, medical accessibility, and equity. Nursing is a rapidly evolving field that has witnessed an extended obligation from primary care to other areas, such as acute care (Rochefort et al., 2020). The future of this profession focuses on exploring how various nurses’ roles, education, training, and responsibilities should change and help meet the ever-increased demands for care which the health reform creates while advancing improvements in the US healthcare system.
The Future of Nursing
Undoubtedly, the decades ahead demand a pool of robust and well-rounded nursing professionals ready to offer care services and meet the ever-increasingly complex, dynamic, and evolving health needs. Hence, the future will attest to a significant percentage of nurses in new and more demanding roles and responsibilities. Nursing professionals constitute the highest portion of the health workforce (Haddad et al., 2022). They also spend quality time with the patients delivering care. This scenario implies that the staff has valuable insights and exceptional capabilities that may help them partner with other health providers to improve care and patient safety as envisioned by the health reform ACA. These professionals should also be involved in various leadership roles involving redesigning the US healthcare system. Therefore, to attain this goal, nursing education should undergo a significant reformation to increase the rate of nurses who graduate with degrees and pursue doctorates to ensure that they prepare thoroughly to conduct these new and future roles.
Over the coming years, a wide range of emerging and unrelenting health, ethical and social issues will continue shaping the nursing profession. For instance, the recent Covid-19 pandemic contributed significantly to unveiling various forms of disparities facing global societies. Such practices have created an urgent need to adjust the nursing profession to address the problems. The crises are an ideal opportunity to scrutinize the field while highlighting the need for effective collaboration for all citizens to have equal access to health services. Specifically, achieving health equity has been one of the visions of the Future of Nursing 2020-30 Committee, emphasizing the need to strengthen the nursing capacity and expertise to achieve this objective (Flaubert et al., 2021). Expanding the roles and responsibilities of nurses will play a central role in allowing these professionals to participate comprehensively in equal medical care and proposing policy measures that will create a healthcare system designed to work for everyone.
Role of the Consensus Model in the Advance Nursing Professionals
Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) constitute a robust and growing force in the American healthcare system. Consensus Model serves as a guide for states to adopt homogeneity in regulating their responsibilities, licensure, endorsement, certification, and academic qualifications. Hence, the framework contributes significantly to uniting the nursing programs and national accreditation organizations in their description of the APRN’s role (Buck, 2021). As a result, it is a practical approach to ensuring that all individuals who aspire to become APRNS face the same standards across states throughout their education and certification applications. The model confers benefits to the nursing professionals, patients, and the current and aspiring future APRNS. Without uniformity, APRNs cannot effectively offer optimal care or practice the full scope of their education, making some patients lack access to quality and equitable care.
Since its inception, the consensus model has enabled states to adopt uniform regulations concerning various aspects of APRNs, including roles, licensure, education qualifications, certification, and accreditation. In other words, it has succeeded in binding this group of professionals together by ensuring that legitimate policies define the practice and the eligibility criteria for everyone. Apart from being inclusive and engaging all the key players, the phenomenon has also played a crucial role in enhancing care quality outcomes while empowering individuals and groups to collaborate and move forward to mold their future. Specifically, the approach has helped address inconsistent nursing education standards, regulations, and practices that hinder APRN mobility from one state to another. The primary objective is to improve access to advanced nursing care via certification, licensure standardization, education, accreditation, and endorsement.
Conclusion
Nursing is one of the rapidly evolving fields in the contemporary era. This trend points to a notable revolution in the nurses’ roles and responsibilities in the future. Today, this workforce occupies the core of care and spends more time with the patients than other health providers. Hence, their scope of care should expand to ensure that they meet the everchanging health needs and participate in health policy development and implementation to enhance equity and accessibility to care for all individuals. Nurses have insights that may be relevant in addressing the problems facing healthcare systems in many societies globally. Therefore, they will likely assume new and complex roles in the future, including acute care, policy-making, and other responsibilities that will help advance the quality of care and patient outcomes. These practices necessitate adjusting the nursing education and training to ensure to prepare they to undertake these duties and assist in meeting the goals envisioned by the health reform.
References
Buck, M. (2021). An update on the consensus model for APRN regulation: More than a decade of progress. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 12(2), 23-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2155-8256(21)00053-3
Flaubert, J. L., Le, M. S., & Williams, D. R. (2021, May 11). The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity. National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK573919/
Haddad, L. M., Annamaraju, P., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2022, February 22). Nursing shortage. National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/
Rochefort, C. M., Abrahamowicz, M., Biron, A., Bourgault, P., Gaboury, I., Haggerty, J., & McCusker, J. (2020). Nurse staffing practices and adverse events in acute care hospitals: The research protocol of a multisite patient‐level longitudinal study. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 77(3), 1567-1577. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14710
write