1-Robin Amidon
In an effort to support this week’s discussion post, I have chosen to focus on the future issues and nursing education. The future issues and nursing education addresses the need to support more creative and critical thinking skills for nurses, acceptance of virtual education and simulation, growth and acceptance of the DNP, significance for accelerated programs, nontraditional students, and a shortage of nurses to educate future nurses (McEwen & Wills, 2017, p. 529). The cultural diversity of the future of nursing and education needs to embody the populations of patients which nursing serves. Cultural diversity means providing representation and proper communication to those with racial, gender, and ethnic populations that are not properly represented. Health promotion needs to also be tailored to needs of those specific needs and promoted with educated people qualified to care for reformations within health care. Healthcare is an evolving practice that garners new education and interventions so education to nurses need to also reflect this aspect. Communication is also important not just as a practice of the nurse to patients, but also the communication of education to support the new nurse with an environment that now consists of online learning platforms and needing more creative thinking and critical thinking exercises. The importance of an evolving technology and learning platform is an essential need for future nurses to be trained efficiently and appropriately.
2-Kristine Burkhardt
There are many issues that are posing and will continue to pose an even greater threat to healthcare delivery and advanced nursing for the future. The topic I chose to expand upon is the growing list of chronic conditions. Nurses, physicians, and mid-level providers are expected to treat a whole host of issues that patients come up with, and these issues are compounding year after year.
Unfortunately, the system is not designed to provide advantageous, user-friendly health care to all patients, rather it is based on physician’s specialties and schedules, and not according to their patient’s needs (McEwen & Wills, 2019). This poses all kinds of problems to the general public and its’ overall health. This is particularly threatening to people with chronic conditions and multiple comorbidities. Currently, the WHO recognizes chronic diseases as a global pandemic (Josi & Bianchi, 2019). In today’s age, chronic, non-communicable diseases make up for around half the burden of disease in high-income countries (Josi & Bianchi, 2019).
In order to combat worsening of chronic illness and comorbidities, primary and preventative care are likely solutions to this pandemic (McEwen & Wills, 2019). In that case, health promotion that is focused on in primary care clinics could be used to do the following: teach prevention and health promotion activities, educate individuals on lifestyle, and its influence on health, provide community resources to complement care, and campaign for policy change to promote health (McEwen & Wills, 2019). In addition to general health promotion, cultural diversity in relation to chronic illness also needs to be taken into consideration. Some cultures might have a general distrust of the Western healthcare system, so understanding and considering these cultural norms and inherent barriers can assist in explaining the self-care habits of different cultures, as found by this research article published in 2021 (Henry Osokpo et al., 2021). Sometimes, delving deeper into someone’s cultural or spiritual practices and beliefs can help identify ways to help the person in question maintain self-care and improve their chronic conditions, in a culturally sensitive way.
Another aspect to consider in delivering patient care to chronically ill persons is communication. Everyone has different communication and learning styles. Advanced nurses, nurses and the health care team need to be mindful of this fact, and use interpersonal communication. This can be done by collaborating with other team members, applying effective and open communication skills, such as asking open ended questions and preparing the environment in a welcoming manner, organizing daily routines to ensure better health care and communication delivery, and of course providing for the patient, a variety of communication tools (McEwen & Wills, 2019).