Where is the nursing proffesion going?

Nurses Activism

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Specializes in Critical care.

As a student we are constantly being given a heavy dose of the current nursing shortage and how much worse it is going to get in the next ten or so years. Also compounding this is the ever rising cost of health insurance, and hospitals becoming mega corporations. Any nurse is going to be over worked with the shortage. Where is the RN gong to fit into all of this, I am not one that sees initials after a name as being better trained or more worthy, but many do and as nurses become fewer and fewer where are we going to be in the health care setting, will we do team nursing that takes the RN away from direct pt care or do you see it staying the same way. Do not read into this question, LPN's can do everything we can do, it is just that most hopitals limit the LPN in their practice w/o an RN around and insurance companies usually pay more with RN's as primary nurses. I am intrested in see what has changed already and what you see in the future. Thanks Mark.:uhoh3:

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Hopefully, the government will step in and do something about all this. That is my hope. In France, the doctors go on strike when they're p**** off. Wish we had something like that here that made the government react more quickly.

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Specializes in Vents, Telemetry, Home Care, Home infusion.

See https://allnurses.com/forums/showpost.php?p=798091&postcount=20

for info adressing Nursing's Agenda for the Future.

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Hopefully, the government will step in and do something about all this. That is my hope. In France, the doctors go on strike when they're p**** off. Wish we had something like that here that made the government react more quickly.

The Government should fix the nursing shortage? How? When I hear that the government is going to fix my problem, my first reaction is to cringe. We don't need another bureaucracy sucking down tax dollars to fix our profession.

In France? Uh, no. Not a role model that I care to emulate.

Be well...

The Mellow One

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Hopefully, the government will step in and do something about all this. That is my hope. In France, the doctors go on strike when they're p**** off. Wish we had something like that here that made the government react more quickly.

It's not up to the government! It's up to the nurses. So my question is...where do the nurses want nursing to go?!

InterestedRN

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The question is not "where is nursing going?" the question is...Where do nurses want nursing to go!?

Nothing will happen for nurses until nurses unite and work together, intelligently, to stimulate change. The notion that government will "step in" and make the necessary changes is crazy. Government won't do anything until nurses lobby government to institute changes!

Thanks

InterestedRN

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I feel that although there is a nursing

shortage we still must provide high quality educations to our students.

If we do not then we are cheating ourselves as well as the patients. I

also feel that by doing this we could be jeopardizing our respect in

society. Nursing are portrayed in a certain caring way and I would not

want that to change.

To change gears I have found that many new nursing students are getting

into nursing because of the job demand and the money. I has a student

just tell me today that for her nursing was not a calling at all but, an

end to a means. Really scary to me. I really feel that we must want to

nurse in order to be a good nurse.

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:crying2: :crying2:

I feel that although there is a nursing

shortage we still must provide high quality educations to our students.

If we do not then we are cheating ourselves as well as the patients. I

also feel that by doing this we could be jeopardizing our respect in

society. Nursing are portrayed in a certain caring way and I would not

want that to change.

To change gears I have found that many new nursing students are getting

into nursing because of the job demand and the money. I has a student

just tell me today that for her nursing was not a calling at all but, an

end to a means. Really scary to me. I really feel that we must want to

nurse in order to be a good nurse.

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Specializes in Gerontological, cardiac, med-surg, peds.

Not saying that I totally agree with this article, but I found it very thought-provoking. Dr. Tim Porter-O'Grady is a nursing and health care visionary.

http://www2.us.elsevierhealth.com/scripts/om.dll/serve?action=get-media&id=a112789&trueID=pdf_112789&location=jno0104904&type=pdf&name=x.pdf

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I am not sure it is a calling to me (I am not even sure what that means! haha) but I do love helping people, making people's lives easier, and I love the fast pace.

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Emulate France. Sounds good to me. In fact, perhaps we should emulate the rest of the industrialized world! The USA is the only industrialized nation that does not have universal health care access. 45 million Americans do not have health insurance. This represents 15.6% of the US population or roughly 1 out of every 6 Americans!

Even "developing" or "third world" nations like Cuba provide universal health care to its citizens.....but I certainly would not want to live there.

You don't think you are being taxed now for your health insurance? Wrong! You are "taxed" in the form of both employee and employer contributions towards health insurance premiums. How much do you pay out of your paycheck each pay period for your health insurance? How much does your employer pay each month? How could this money be allocated differently if it didn't have to be used to pay for health insurance? Call it a tax or call it a premium, bottom line is that in the USA we spend more per capital on health care but continue to have 15.6% of our population uninsured. And we pay for this to as our premiums and taxes reflect the cost of providing emergency care to such indivuduals.

Health care expenditures represent one of the highest costs of doing business in America. Of any country in the world, we have the highest percentage of our GNP devoted to health care expenses yet we rank far lower in health indicators for quality of life as defined the the W.H.O.

The way I see it, we already have national health care in this country for specific segments of the populations (children and the disabled living in poverty via medicaid and the elderly via medicare and sometimes medicaid). These two programs work very well despite some of their limitations. A national universal health care program for all American is clearly something that might benefit our country but something that will never happen due to the vested interests in our for profit health care system and private insurance industry.

The Government should fix the nursing shortage? How? When I hear that the government is going to fix my problem, my first reaction is to cringe. We don't need another bureaucracy sucking down tax dollars to fix our profession.

In France? Uh, no. Not a role model that I care to emulate.

Be well...

The Mellow One

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Specializes in Gerontological, cardiac, med-surg, peds.

Good post, Ross1.

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