Considering that the population in the United States is aging, nursing managers need to ensure that hospitals and medical facilities are provided with enough equipment, effective staff, and specialized health care workforce who will be able to address the needs of elderly and frail patients. As Dall et al. (2013) point out, the increased prevalence of chronic diseases and complex medical conditions in such patients will cause the need for trained and competent, a specialized workforce that will be able to address the problem of long wait times for appointments, improve their quality of life, and improve the quality of provided healthcare.
To control costs and maintain adequate staff, hospitals need to provide training programs for the hired workforce to expand their scope of practice and ensure that some of the procedures do not require physician’s supervision and can be performed by nursing professionals independently. This needs to be done to allow trained physicians to focus on more complex and challenging cases, thus increasing their productivity and quality of provided care. The nurse manager will be responsible for restructuring staff and ensuring that they have access to new training programs. Furthermore, nursing managers will also need to evaluate the efficiency of the programs after their implementation.
The increasing diversity of American society also has to be taken into consideration. To reduce health disparities between different minorities, hospitals will need to create fellowships that will support health equality and address health disparities among patients and staff (Phillips & Malone, 2014). The role of nurse managers will be to lead these fellowships to the maintenance of equal access to healthcare for everyone and provide workshops or lectures for both patients and employees who want to support health equality. Nurse managers will also gather feedback on the effectiveness of these fellowships and their influence on access to healthcare in the facility to minorities.
References
Dall, T. M., Gallo, P. D., Chakrabarti, R., West, T., Semilla, A. P., & Storm, M. V. (2013). An aging population and growing disease burden will require a large and specialized health care workforce by 2025. Health Affairs, 32(11), 20-26.
Phillips, J. M., & Malone, B. (2014). Increasing racial/ethnic diversity in nursing to reduce health disparities and achieve health equity. Public Health Reports, 129(1), 45-50.