Aetna 2002 Annual Report Download - page 29

 
Nurses’ Expanding Roles
 . , .., ..
The Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Sociology, Director of the
Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, University of Pennsylvania
Nurses are now so central to American health care that they’re
assuming greater responsibility in clinical care.
Nurses have forged expanded roles for themselves in a much-altered medical division of labor.
Besides taking on a variety of essential clinical and administrative roles in conventional health
care settings, nurses are bringing their unique perspectives to health law, journalism, politics,
policy-making, and teaching and research in leading universities. The U.S. Department of
Labor lists nursing as one of the five occupations with the highest expected job growth. The
attractiveness of nursing as a career is exemplified by sustained growth in applications to
nursing schools from college graduates in other fields.
Research is producing persuasive evidence that establishes direct links between availability
of adequate numbers of nurses and critical outcomes, including patients’ risk of death
following common surgical procedures, the probability of an adverse occurrence during
hospitalization and patient satisfaction. Indeed, nurses devised many of the innovations that
have made hospital care safer and more patient centered, including intensive care, hospice,
and family-centered maternity care. Nurses thus rate among the most trusted professionals
in consumer polls.
As the burden of illness shifts from acute to chronic conditions and as the population
ages, nurses’ holistic approaches to health care are increasingly sought by patients and families.
Almost , nurses have earned advanced degrees to assume expanded roles in clinical
care, including the authority to prescribe drugs. Nurse practitioners provide more than
million outpatient visits and . million emergency department visits annually. More than
a third of Americans now see nurse practitioners or other nonphysician caregivers each year
for primary health services.
Nurses have become so central to the health care enterprise that shortages create major
disruptions in care threatening the safety of those who entrust their lives to health care
professionals. For all of our sakes we need the wisdom to replenish the nurse work force with
the best and brightest, and create practice environments that enable nurses to excel in care-
giving, which motivated them to be nurses in the first place.