On March 23, 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed into law to increase Americans’ medical coverage. The United States has the highest healthcare expenditure compared to other developed countries. Despite the high spending, the U.S. has fallen short of fulfilling its citizens’ healthcare needs (Fischer, 2016). The ACA was passed to ensure that every person had access to quality healthcare at an affordable cost. The Affordable Care Act has affected the nursing profession in different ways as more citizens have acquired the ability to access healthcare services.
The ACA aims to control costs and improve the quality of healthcare. The ACA will have transformative changes that will affect nurses due to their role. Nurses are positioned to lead and contribute to the structural changes that occur in healthcare by being integral team players in a profession that aims to offer quality and affordable care (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017). The ACA uses value-based care models to identify a healthcare delivery system that is effective.
Hence, nursing professionals are required by the act to keep members of the population healthy (Cleveland, Motter, & Smith, 2019). Healthcare organizations are incentivized by the value-based care strategy to meet patients’ health outcomes. The ACA has established a system that focuses on prevention, wellness, minimizing costs, and reducing repetition (Cleveland et al., 2019). Nurses have remained a critical component of healthcare reform due to the relationship between their roles and the affected delivery system by the new laws or regulations.
The ACA will increase healthcare coverage across the United States, leading to an increase in the number of people needing nursing assistance. As more people continue to access better healthcare due to the ACA, nurses will be required to be fully engaged in their roles to ensure there is an improved health outcome among populations and a better patient care experience (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017). It is the objective of the ACA to increase the number of people who access affordable healthcare without compromising on quality. Hence, nursing role and responsibility should align with the new act’s reforms and intentions.
Quality measures and pay for performance have had positive impacts on patient outcomes. Providing quality healthcare is a key priority of health reforms in the United States. Quality measures allow practitioners and other stakeholders to quantify healthcare processes, patient outcomes, patient perceptions, and health systems that have the ability to provide high-quality healthcare (Adirim, Meade, & Mistry, 2016). Health outcomes are assessed by comparing the existing standards to the measures in place and how healthcare practitioners follow the set guidelines.
Quality measures and pay for performance have incentivized healthcare practitioners to adhere to clinical guidelines. The value-based care models encourage health experts to keep populations healthy by making outcomes a significant part of healthcare, rather than focusing more on the volume of care (Adirim et al., 2016). Quality measures ensure that nursing practitioners prioritize the nature of their services. Hence, nurses must adhere to clinical guidelines to ensure patient outcomes improve. The pay-for-performance model changes nurses’ expectations from the volume of service of care focus to an outcome focus (Adirim et al., 2016). Hence, the quality measures and pay-for-performance strategy have made the nursing practice patient outcome their primary objective.
Nurses play a critical role in leadership and management when it comes to directing care process changes. They are crucial leaders in healthcare delivery changes because they have to make reforms adopted successfully (Rasheed, Younas, & Mehdi, 2020). In a diverse healthcare setting, nursing practitioners’ leadership and management are tested with how they collaborate with other team members to improve patient outcomes and enhance healthcare delivery. Nurses possess information that can be used to influence policy and practice (Rasheed et al., 2020). Hence, it is becoming common to involve nurses in healthcare reforms. Their leadership and management involvement will improve healthcare delivery systems and patient outcomes.
There are different trends that are emerging in the nursing profession. There is a global shortage of nursing practitioners, which will require an increase in the number of practitioners to meet demand. Healthcare has switched from a volume to a quality-based industry. Hence, more nurses will be hired to meet the objectives of healthcare delivery systems (Drennan & Ross, 2019). Furthermore, nurses will have more opportunities to contribute to healthcare reforms either in policy or practice. Nurses are at the forefront of healthcare delivery and better understand what needs to be done to improve patient outcomes and healthcare quality (Rasheed et al., 2020). Hence, more nurses will play a pivotal role in healthcare reforms.
The Affordable Care Act was enacted to bring healthcare delivery changes and ensure more Americans had access to quality healthcare. It has had a significant impact on nursing practice because nurses oversee healthcare delivery and the improvement of populations’ health. The nursing output is required in health reforms such as the ACA because such changes affect their practice. Therefore, nurses will continue to be an integral part of healthcare delivery.
References
Adirim, T., Meade, K., & Mistry, K. (2016). A new era in quality measurement: The development and application of quality measures. Pediatrics, 139(1), e20163442. Web.
Cleveland, K. A., Motter, T., & Smith, Y. (2019). Affordable care: Harnessing the power of nurses. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 24(2). Web.
Drennan, V. M., & Ross, F. (2019). Global nurse shortages—the facts, the impact and action for change. British Medical Bulletin, 130(1), 25–37. Web.
Fischer, K. M. (2016). How the educational funding provisions of the patient protection and Affordable Care Act will affect the nursing shortage in the United States. Journal of Law and Social Policy, 11(1).
Rasheed, S. P., Younas, A., & Mehdi, F. (2020). Challenges, extent of involvement, and the impact of nurses’ involvement in politics and policy making in in last two decades: An integrative review. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 52(4), 446–455. Web.
Salmond, S. W., & Echevarria, M. (2017). Healthcare transformation and changing roles for nursing. Orthopaedic Nursing, 36(1), 12–25. Web.