ALB GO MA

The nursing profession is a critical part of healthcare. However, nurses continue to face different policy issues. While nurses commit to caring for patients, their personal and professional needs are often neglected. Policies fail to satisfy nurses’ needs partly because policymakers may have little knowledge about the healthcare profession. Some of the issues that nurses might lobby congress on are explored below. Poor labor policies affect the nursing profession. Nurses work under a range of work time arrangements, on-call scheduling, and extended shifts. The use of these arrangements inappropriately impacts the nursing personnel negatively. Park & Yu (2019) state that poor labor policies result in high turnover rates for nurses, which leads to staff shortages. Inadequate staffing not only threatens the patients’ health and care but also leads to an increase in fatigue, pressure, and injury rate by nurses. Balanced working arrangements that improve employee morale and reduce staff turnover are shown to increase nurse productivity (Park & Yu, 2019). 

A satisfactory salary is significant in retaining employees. Some professional nurses are underpaid. The general impact of salaries and compensation on nurses’ outcome vary in different states in the US (Park & Yu, 2019). Although good salaries are important, other factors such as work conditions and environment are critical in keeping nurses satisfied in their work areas. Turale & Kunaviktikul (2019) outline three strategies that are particularly useful for policy advocacy by nurses. The first strategy is locality development. Using this strategy, nurses energize all interested parties toward a common concern (Turale & Kunaviktikul, 2019). Advocacy becomes a matter of assembling slack resources. A case in point would be a rural nurse working with local organizations and residents to improve healthcare policies in the local hospital. A nurse that applies the locality development strategy needs skills in public speaking, mediation, program development, organizational skills, and coalition building (Turale & Kunaviktikul, 2019).

The second strategy, social planning, is a collaborative approach that presumes substantial consensus on the type of challenge. The kind of advocacy needed for social planning is highly technical. The strategy involves collaboration with other health providers. For instance, nurses planning a program to improve working conditions can collaborate with other health providers such as doctors to advocate for new policies. The nurses can work with technical experts to evaluate the effects of the intervention. The interactions among the involved parties are usually impersonal and task-oriented, which helps achieve the goal. The third strategy, social action, applies to situations where involved parties have strong disagreements over the policies involved. An example would be overtime hours, where some workers are comfortable since they need the extra money while others want the working hours to be reduced. The professional’s next step could include contacting the appropriate policy makers and asking them to take action; enlisting a journalist to expose the long working hours and the hospital’s disregard for patient safety; advising the conflicting nurses that long working hours are a threat to quality patient care; getting support from other health professionals, and organizing demonstrations and rallies. In this strategy, the nurse must take a side and become actively involved.Maintaining appropriate policies for nurses is a fundamental condition for decent healthcare provision. Policies not only reduce medical errors but also promotes quality health services. Nurses must apply relevant approaches to have their voices heard by policymakers and implementors. 

References

Park, H., & Yu, S. (2019). Effective policies for eliminating nursing workforce shortages: a systematic review. Health Policy and Technology, 8(3), 296-303.

Turale, S., & Kunaviktikul, W. (2019). The contribution of nurses to health policy and advocacy requires leaders to provide training and mentorship. International nursing review, 66(3), 302-304.