Nursing Advocacy Essay Example

The Nurse as Advocate In a Microsoft Word document of 5-6 pages formatted in APA style, you will describe the advocacy process. Whether nurses are advocating for their patients, health care, and/or policies that improve people’s lives, the advocacy processes have commonalities that transcend the subject of their advocacy. There are also differences, although these differences may be more nuanced than obvious. Review the following chapters from your course textbook: Taking Action: Nurse, Educator, and Legislator: My Journey to the Delaware Senate Taking Action: A Nurse in the Board Room Respond to the following questions based on your readings: Describe what you believe to be the drivers for each of the individual advocates. What factors led the individuals to become advocates? Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.  Discuss the challenges that each of the individuals identified in their writings. Analyze these drivers and challenges and compare them with your own experience to date as an advocate. In what ways do you believe you can expand your advocacy skills within the next five years? On a separate references page, cite all sources using APA format.

Nursing is a noble profession that involves more than just treatment and provision to patients. Nurses’ role in health care allows them to spend more time with patients and families than other healthcare providers. Prolonged exposure allows them to understand the patient as a unique human being with special needs on top of the universal health needs. Therefore, the nurse is better placed to understand what is best for the client than anyone else. The exposure comes with a responsibility that the nurse has to create awareness of the needs of the patient to all other parties involved. That responsibility is known as advocacy where the nurse represents and pleads on behave of the vulnerable (the patient). Nursing advocacy takes place among caregivers, authorities that influence health, and the public at large. The goal of advocacy is to ensure that all healthcare consumers are treated equally and all human rights are observed (Abbasinia, Ahmadi & Kazemnejad, 2020). This essay analyses the process of nursing advocacy, its effectiveness, challenges, and driving factors.

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Nursing Advocacy Process

Advocacy in healthcare is done strategically for effectiveness. The initial stage in nursing advocacy is the identification of the opportunity or challenge that requires an intervention. Various situations occur in healthcare which in some cases proves to be very effective for client management while others prove to be disastrous. The effective cases are the ones identified as opportunities. Through evidence-based practice, healthcare evolves giving room for the discovery of interventions that are more effective than what has been used in the past. When routine has proven to be effective, the role of the nurse to advocate the same is applied in future healthcare management of a similar kind (Abbasinia, Ahmadi & Kazemnejad, 2020).  Other practices are rendered ineffective or unrealistic through research. Those are considered as challenges that require to be eradicated in healthcare practice and replaced with others that are effective.

The next step of the process is to determine the key audiences. The audience as mentioned above could be other healthcare providers, authorities, and the public at large. Identification of the audience is paramount since it allows advocates to decern the best approach to us. Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.  The advocates then set out a mission to establish what the audience already knows or perceives about the challenge or the opportunity identified. The next step is to determine the means of communication that the audience uses. This step is essential for the nurses to develop a strategy that will allow effective communication of the idea at hand (Abbasinia, Ahmadi & Kazemnejad, 2020). The advocates then develop achievable goals that have a timeline. The advocates then develop a strategy on how to disseminate the information to the audience. The last step of the process is an evaluation done to establish if the goals set are realized within the stipulated timeline.

Drivers for Nursing Advocacy

Every nurse has a responsibility to advocate for their patients. However, not every caregiver provides the same services for their consumer. Different factors influence nursing advocacy and its efficiency in the practical world of health care. Policies are one of the major influencers of nursing advocacy. Each healthcare facility has its policies that spell out what their employees can do and what they can’t. Unfortunately, some of the facilities have rules and regulations that oppress the freedom of the caregivers at large. Others have a long and tedious process that the caregiver has to follow for such an initiative to take place. Consequently, such facilities demotivate the nurse from advocating for the rights of their clients. On the other hand, other facilities are generally motivating to caregivers with minimal or no restrictions between the workers and the management (Staebler et al., 2017). In such a health center, both opportunities and challenges are easily identified and advocacy is initiated.

Resources also act as drivers of advocacy be it financial or material ones. The process as mention above requires a massive input of time, resources to be used during communication with the audience. Limited or lack of the fundamental resources needed in the process may limit the initiative to conduct advocacy. The knowledge level of the care providers is a key driver in advocacy. One cannot advocate or initiate change for something they are not familiar with or have enough information on the same. Some institutions ensure that their workers attend continuous medical education seminars to keep them updated with trending issues. Such an initiative is a motivation for the advocacy nature of the care providers (Thomas et al., 2017). Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.  Personal experience is also a driver of the advocacy culture. Some of the nurses unfortunately have been health consumers directly or indirectly. In some cases, the services they get do not match their expectations. The experience triggers the urge to advocate for other consumers that they may not experience inadequate care or be denied their rights.

Challenges in Nursing Advocacy

There exists barriers to nursing advocacy that may limit their effectiveness in practice. One of the main barriers of the same is ineffective cooperation among healthcare providers. The advocacy process originates from a setting that works together to establish the effectiveness of the idea to be presented to the audience. Therefore, the workers must work together to develop a common idea before presenting it to the other parties involved. However, effective cooperation may not be achieved in some settings where they don’t work as a team. In such cases, the idea is dismissed before the advocacy process is started or along the way before the last stages (Oliveira & Tariman, 2017). Ineffective communication is also a challenge where the advocates fail to pass information about the opportunity effectively to the audience.

An unsupportive environment or poor working terms can also be barriers to nursing advocacy. As mentioned earlier, leadership and management within a healthcare setting can motivate or demotivate nursing advocacy. Culture clash in healthcare is also a barrier and more so where the ideas in the advocacy process go against the values and beliefs of either party involved. In most scenarios, the medical benefit is overlooked as they uphold their customs and practices. Unsuccessful advocacy processes are also a hindrance in healthcare (Oliveira & Tariman, 2017). As mentioned earlier, a lot of resources are used during the process with the hope of improvement in care provision. Therefore, when the process fails, the resources are considered waste and the individuals or institutions involved may be unwilling to risk for a similar process.

Advancing Advocacy Skills

Nursing advocacy requires skills to initiate successful representative roles for the patients. Therefore, one needs to constantly sharpen their skills towards the same to ensure effective performance. One of the ways to improve advocacy skills is attending continuous medical educations forums. The seminars allow the sharing of ideas between the health workers on matters revolving around healthcare and new strategies that have proven effective. The forums also equip workers with knowledge on trending health issues that require their input. That way they will know to require to initiate successful advocacy campaigns (Thomas et al., 2017).  Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.  Improving communication skills is also a way to sharpen advocacy skills. Good communication skills ensure that the nurse passes information effectively to the audience. Practicing good leadership and management skills also sharpen the skills of workers since they are liberty to practice advocacy when a need is identified (Staebler et al., 2017). Extensive research also improves leadership skills. Research exposes the workers to various works that have been done and how they were conducted. The nurse gets an opportunity to explore the possible outcomes even before initiating the process. That way, they identify areas of weaknesses in their plan and modify them to increase the chances of success.

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Conclusion

Nurses have a responsibility to advocate for the rights of their clients to ensure they receive fair treatment. They are better placed to advocate for the client since they have more personal exposure to the patient compared to other health workers (Thomas et al., 2017). Therefore, they have a responsibility to identify gaps, needs, and opportunities in healthcare that require interventions to improve or enhance the practice. However various drivers influence the need to advocate for consumers including hospital policies, level of knowledge available resources, cohesiveness among workers, and personal experiences. The advocacy process has challenges that include communication barriers, cultural conflicts, inadequate resources, inadequate knowledge, failures in the past, and poor interpersonal relationships among healthcare providers. Fortunately, there are various ways to improve advocacy skills including conducting extensive research, attending continuous medical education, practicing good leadership, and improving one’s communication skills. Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.

References

Abbasinia, M., Ahmadi, F., & Kazemnejad, A. (2020). Patient advocacy in nursing: A concept analysis. Nursing Ethics, 27(1), 141-151.

Oliveira, C., & Tariman, J. D. (2017). Barriers to the patient advocacy role: An integrative review of the literature. Journal of Nursing Practice Applications & Reviews of Research, 7(2), 7-12.

Staebler, S., Campbell, J., Cornelius, P., Fallin-Bennett, A., Fry-Bowers, E., Kung, Y. M., … & Miller, J. (2017). Policy and political advocacy: A comparison study of nursing faculty to determine current practices, perceptions, and barriers to teaching health policy. Journal of Professional Nursing, 33(5), 350-355.

Thomas, A., Crabtree, M. K., Delaney, K., Dumas, M. A., Kleinpell, R., Marfell, J., & Wolf, A. (2017). Nurse practitioner core competencies content. The National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties.  Nursing Advocacy Essay Example.