Nursing
There are several pros and cons to requiring a nurse to have a BSN to enter nursing practice. The most obvious advantage is that it would standardize practice and ensure excellence. Today, healthcare has been under the spotlight for potential pitfalls and difficulties in areas of care and excellence. If nurses have the same or similar qualifications before entering practice, there is less potential for error (Santina, 2012).
Furthermore, the course requires three years of not only theory, but also of hands-on practice, both in the classroom and in real-time environments such as clinics and hospitals. There are few teaching methods that offer as much in terms of personal and educational development as practical experience. This is particularly true of nursing and other healthcare practice arenas. Hence, more years of hands-on experience is a major advantage of requiring this kind of qualification before allowing nurses to enter practice (Santina, 2012). Indeed, a good idea is to allow them to enter practice for the first time only under the condition that this would be under supervision for a required time of practice.
The most obvious disadvantage of only allowing nurses with a BSN to enter nursing practice is the fact that there is already is shortage of nurses in the country. Hence, the profession would benefit from allowing several types of qualification for entry into the profession. The particular type of qualification a nurse has does not necessarily mean a better or worse quality of service being provided. Various levels of entry could, for example, be established for various types of qualifications, in addition to differentiated requirements for supervision.
In essence, it would be better to allow more nurses into the profession than fewer. Allowing more nurses into the profession would mean a larger amount of nurses...
This would, of course, also affect the practice of the profession. For nurses with fewer years of study, this also means that the level at which they enter the profession has to be different from that of nurses with a longer term of study. Nurses with an Associate Degree, for example, studied for two years. While those with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing studied for four years (Miller, 2007).
In practice, this would mean that BSN nurses have a higher level of practical experience and theoretical knowledge to handle more complicated cases than those who enter with only an ADN. This does not mean, however, that excellence is in any way affected. In practice, nurses with either qualification will be as excellent as their inner drive allows them to be. The difference in qualification only means that there are different levels of competence in nursing practice, which is influenced by years of study (Miller, 2007).
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According to Orsolini-Hain (2008), there are three studies suggesting a link between nurse qualification and patient safety. In common sense, also, it seems logical to assume that more years of study would affect nursing excellence across the healthcare field.
The studies that were conducted, for example, suggest that there is a consistent link between an increased proportion of Registered Nurses with more years of study with decreased patient mortality rates. The suggestion is that a significant amount of patients tend to live longer and recover more quickly when nurses with more years of study care for them (Orsolini-Hain, 2008).
The combined studies involved almost 300 hospitals, 300,000…
