Nurses as the Most Highly Trusted Health Professionals: A Discussion

As people’s life expectancy increases, the nursing field needs to keep pace with the rapid changes. There’s increased needs for nurses in many different field as well such as nursing home, hospitals, ambulatory cares, palliative care, and hospices. Therefore, an expectation of a role as a nurse has been rise. Nursing skills and knowledge cannot remain limited, but need to utilize in more various setting. In order to provide better care in various nursing field, continuing education is essential. For example, as population and their lifespan increases there’s also new diseases and new treatment has been developed. A competence nurse must embrace old and new skills and thorough knowledge to achieve best quality of care and optimum patient’s overall outcome. The quality of patient care heavily depends on nurses’ level of education. One research proves that nurses who received higher level of education showed lower mortality rate, less medical errors, and higher patient satisfaction. This outcome is related to higher education which prepared nurses to handle various circumstances with appropriate answers. Nurses are people who spend most of time with ill individuals at the bed side. Nursing education will provide new demanding roles of nurses’ requirement such as seeing the patient as a whole, providing appropriate response to patient’s condition, and integrating knowledge and skills accordingly.

Image. The media diverts the attention of the young adults who may be interested in nursing by focusing on the challenges that nurse’s face rather than the aspects of the career that are rewarding.

I learned the importance of education for developing nursing practice and respect to nursing job, which originate from and was a women’s important social role.

Over the past number of years there has been a nursing shortage which has led to the need of more registered nurses in the hospital setting. This is due to the uprising acuity of patient care and a decrease in there overall hospital stay. In order for the patients to get safe and quality care, the staffing, education and experience of the nursing staff needs to be made a priority. Not only has the safety and quality of patient care suffered, the working conditions in hospitals

In both Cohen’s (2007) & Hoeve et al. (2003) articles reviewing the image of nursing and public perception, both articles expand on the wide range of perspectives on nursing made by the general public. Oftentimes nurses are not recognized for their professionalism instead stereotyped, sexualized, and devalued to “the doctor’s handmaiden” or a “sexy nurse”. Due to these biases and stereotypes, nurses must work even harder to prove that they are indeed a

The constant problem that nurses have is having a low staffing rate which can lead to bigger problems in the end. They are not always treated good so they end up leaving their job when they shouldn’t even have to go through all of this at work. This includes everyone in the workplace, even patients and co-workers and you would think that the patients would be nice to their nurses when they are just trying to care of them. Their bosses overwork them without giving out long breaks which can lead to the nurses have back problems or just being so exhausted. Not having long breaks or at least a 30 minute break could also lead to having problems with their joints then they would have to miss work. If they miss work then they miss out on the money

The field of nursing encompasses a vast array of knowledge, skills, and professionalism. However, often times the image of nursing does not mirror these things. What is image? Many individuals may answer this question differently depending on their age, personal experiences, and exposure to media. The image of nursing is the overall idea, perception, or belief of what nursing is. Image is an important factor in nursing, as a false image may discredit the true heart of nursing, leading to misconceptions that may directly affect how patient care is implemented, as well as recruitment into the profession. This paper will discuss the image of nursing with a look at an historical image compared to contemporary image of nursing, how the public’s image affects nursing recruitment, and a look at both personal and professional strategies that can be used to improve the image of nursing.

Throughout time the world’s image on Nursing has evolved rapidly. Nurses work in an extremely stressful environment and must carry out their duties in a professional manner to ensure proper procedures are followed throughout their routines. They also have a considerable amount of responsibility that comes with their career. For those reasons nurses must present themselves in a professional and structured manner at all times. The Image of Nursing describes how people in and out of the profession see nurses. Nurses must protect and continuously improve their image by fully applying themselves to their profession every day. Nurses complete rigorous course studies to obtain the ability to manage themselves and lead others towards a common

Not all stereotypes are bad. Not all stereotypes undermine the value of contemporary nursing. A nursing stereotype is often described the image of nurse that viewed by the public (Cunningham, 1999). The image of nurses has changed dramatically over time. As well as, nursing has always been subject, historically to stereotypes. Nurses are considered as the ultimate contemporary healthcare professionals. The progression of contemporary nursing extended from predominantly domestic works which instructed by doctors (Bloomfiled, 1999). Nursing still remains particular core values of kindness, caring and compassion which acts to protect its future. However, the negative stereotypes can be occupational hazard of the nursing profession which undermine

The greatest impact this public image of nursing has on development of nurses' self-concept and professional identity. The idea that nurses are subordinated to physicians is predominant in the self-concept and professional identity of nurses. It makes them feel that thay do not have power to advocate for their profession. Studies had shown that negative public image of nursing created nurses’ low self-concept. From the other hand nurses' negative self-concept and presentation influence the public's opinion. (Hoeve et al., 2013)

I was able to ask the questions and interject some patient teaching in the midst. The interviewees gave opinion from different ages perspective and I could gather such data to determine the overall view of the image of the nurse. The different views to “what is your opinion of the nurse” gave that insight, overall, that they saw the nurse as someone involved in caring, that ensure medications were given; saw the nurse as the person who works closely with the doctor instead of being sub ornate to the doctor. All of them saw the nurse as being a positive figure in either their lives or the lives of their loved ones. They had no idea that the nurse could work with them as a doctor would and still able to give quality and trusting care. The IOM report states that every nurse should practice to the full extent of their education, holds true, when now earning a Master’s degree, begins the “stepping stone” towards getting that added certificate towards earning that added function ability to be the care giver and the added responsibility of being that member of the team of researchers. Today, nurses are venturing in different fields as Nurse leaders excel towards decision making and utilizing research utilization in molding the final product of great evidence based practice. It is because of opinion such as these, that channels the media into now depicting through T.V programs such as ER, to show new and improved image of nurses. The responses of the interviewers, depicted the nurse today as those who works more closely with patients and who ensures that they are safe, who introduces decreased cost when hospital visits are averted and decreased. Resulting from this, is the indirect contribution from nurses, that allows for a greater decrease in mortality rate, in morbidity rates, because the society see

You discussed an interesting point regarding the public views of nursing. The media portrays the nursing profession in ways that may be demeaning, such as television shows like The View. Other professions may have problems with perception as well. For example, a car salesman or a lawyer noted for not being truthful. Nursing may have a perception problem, but in most cases nurses are respected for their knowledge and compassion. As you stated, respect is related to the nurse’s skill and education. Education is essential for the nursing profession, it leads to respect and high quality of nursing care. Physicians and patients rely on the nurse’s ability to maintain current knowledge to provide exceptional care.

There are various approaches as to how working conditions could be improved for the nursing department, the simple solution being to increase wages. In other occupations this may be the most appropriate and straight-forward approach however in the nursing sector, the idea to raise wages needs to be thoughtfully considered and its effect needs evaluation from multiple perspectives. No doubt, raising wages will heighten the appeal of the occupation, attracting more people into the line of work and therefore fixing the nurse shortage. However this doesn’t improve the preexisting problems regarding work conditions. Bowles & Candela (2005) raised the discussion of whether increasing the output of new graduate nurses is the solution and will solve the shortage problem. Raising nurse’s wage will attract more employees but as Brekke & Nyborg (2010) delved into greater detail, there is a potential risk that higher wage will attract the “wrong type” of people to fill the roles. As a result, the number of nurses will increase but the quality of the nurses employed will remain consistently is unclear . Lets say that idealistically this wasn’t a problem, the

"Nursing does not have a strong relationship with the media. When the media approaches nurses, it focuses on human-interest stories rather than on our professional abilities. By publicly sharing aspects of our work, nurses will gain more recognition and thus help to enhance the public image of nursing. Image of nursing shows that the public is not always aware of the qualifications nurses need for their profession. As the result, their actual public image is different and inappropriate, and tends to be influenced by nursing stereotypes.

The nursing image is a concept with several different dimensions that includes four topics: how the public views nursing, the nurse’s self-image (professional identity), how the nurse perceives the public’s views, and how the media characterizes or shows nursing (Rezaei-Adaryani et al. 2012). These four topics are very closely interrelated. How the media presents nursing affects the public’s image of nursing. This in turn affects how the nurse interprets how the public views them, which leads to the nurse’s personal self-image being changed or distorted. These four topics create a continuous cycle. If one topic