Introduction
The nursing profession is the largest part of the health care personnel. Today, it comprises about 3 million members. Working directly with patients, nurses play a major role in helping to understand the objectives of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and improving the health care system of the United States of America (Institute of Medicine, 2011). To understand the impact of the 2010 IOM report on the overall future of nursing, its influence on nursing education, practice, and the nurse’s role as a leader has to be considered.
The Impact of the IOM Report on Nursing Education
Over the past century, the health challenges in the United States of America have increased significantly. The nation’s healthcare needs have increased accordingly. According to the Institute of Medicine (2011) “How nurses were educated during the 20th century are no longer adequate for dealing with the realities of health care in the 21st century”. Nursing education specialized in acute care instead of public health and primary care. It had to be revised and updated to comply with today’s needs of the patients, modern science, and technology achievements (Institute of Medicine, 2011).
To develop a more educated workforce, severe changes in the education of nurses are required, including the education before and after receiving the nursing license. The license should serve as a way to continue learning and getting to higher degree programs. There are several programs such as LPN-to-BSN, AND-to-BSN, AND-to-MSN designed for the transition between undergraduate and graduate programs (Institute of Medicine, 2011).
Today, in the United States of America, one of the issues that continue to interrupt the nurses’ workforce is high turnover rates. It can be fixed by paying more attention to the newly graduated nurses’ transition from education to practice. Nurse residency programs can help newly graduated nurses to transit into practice by giving them knowledge and skills. Also, these programs develop the necessary leadership skills (Institute of Medicine, 2011).
The Impact of the IOM on Nursing Practice
Changing of health care system requires a reconsidering of healthcare workers, including nurses. Being trained and educated to provide a lot of medical services, today, nurses are ready to meet the needs of providing patient-centered care, delivering more primary care, and delivering care in the community as opposed to acute care (Institute of Medicine, 2011). Today’s nurses work with a full variety of health care services. Sometimes nurses provide services that are usually considered to be a physicians’ work, but with additional social and medical care.
One of the major advantages of primary care nursing is that the patient builds trust in his or her nurse. This type of nursing has proved to be beneficial for the fast recovery of patients and building a nurse-client relationship (Dunphy et al., 2015). Nowadays, among other services nurses provide, they manage possible medical errors, decrease the spread of infections, and help patients to move on to home treatment. Despite this fact, most states continue to limit the nursing practice (Institute of Medicine, 2011).
Today, primary care in the United States of America is ready to have more implementation than it has now. Nurses should be allowed to practice using all of their education, skills, and competence. The outdated health care services should be replaced by modern ones, in which nurses should play a meaningful role. This will lead to the improvement of a health care system in general.
The Impact of the IOM Report on the Nurse’s Role as a Leader
To transform the health care system, leadership from nurses is necessary at every level of the health care system. Nurses should begin to learn leadership skills as early as it is possible. They should be given the most relevant knowledge and practical skills to get ready for their nursing practice.
To become leaders, nurses should cope with policy. They have to become a part of the policy and have a voice in health care decisions. Nurses must make changes using their leadership knowledge to improve the quality of patient care. Nurses must learn the leadership principles to create partnerships that will help to develop the quality of health care services (Bleich, 2011).
Conclusion
To understand the impact of the 2010 IOM report on the overall future of nursing, its influence on nursing education, practice, and the nurse’s role as a leader has to be considered. Over the past 100 years, the health care needs in the United States of America have increased significantly. To make nurses ready to challenge the current issues of health care, their educational program must be changed. Nurses should be given more theoretical and practical knowledge on the transition from education to work. Having a wide range of skills, nurses should be given a chance to use it to improve the health care system. To increase the quality of patient centered-care, nurses must be allowed to become leaders, and to make decisions on changes in the health care system.
References
Bleich, M. R. (2011). IOM report; The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health: Milestones and challenges in expanding nursing science. Research in nursing & health, 34(3), 169-170.
Dunphy, L. M., Winland-Brown, J., Porter, B., & Thomas, D. (2015). Primary Care: Art and Science of Advanced Practice Nursing. Philadelphia, PA: FA Davis.
Institute of Medicine. (2011). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.