Arguments for and against a position

¶ … Pro-Or Con

There is a revolutionary change in the profession of nursing during the last ten years and it is persistently changing with involvement of new technology and research being carried out in this field. The advent of the present century is expected to entail new confrontations and new issues in the field of nursing with regard to the responsibilities of the nurses. To cope with the future requirements and the needs of the profession the nursing community is assessing and appraising the trends and transformations taking place in the society that will considerably influence the field of nursing in the ensuing century. The needs of the society that is associated with healthcare, along with the potential economic and political situations are influencing the variations and modifications that will be essential in the field of nursing. We shall now take a look at the pros and cons of the nursing profession.

The CON POSITION

The nursing profession is being challenged by the unsympathetic attitude of non-cooperating colleagues and patients, rigorous night duties, varying responsibilities, inattention to their families etc. Consequently, about 20% of the nurses think of leaving their job within the next five years because of adverse working environment. During the mid-1990s, restricted budgetary constraints, both by the government and by managed care companies, compelled many hospitals that were hiring only the registered nurses to increasingly depend on the less skilled nurses and on nurse aides. The nurse aides do not necessarily have high school diplomas and they are now deployed in many hospitals and constitute about 33% of the entire nursing staff. In Chicago the situation has been observed to be so awful that the staffs engaged in housecleaning is forced to perform the duties of aides to dispense medicines. Hospitals presently are scheduling nurses to take care of at least 15 patients at a time which is considered double the workload against the yardstick prescribed. The scheduling of nurses forces them to work for more than 16 hours per shift and they are also compelled to perform obligatory overtime under the threat of dismissal. The overburdened nurses are being compelled to manage more jobs beyond the expectation and are also being compelled to perform the procedures in which they have not been sufficiently trained. Our nurses have exerted their fullest possible potentialities. With the emergence of the managed care system nurses are also equally engaged in doing the paper works than performing care facilities to the patients.

The nursing profession is awfully wearisome. The nursing career is vulnerable to the problem of burnout as a result of persistent exposure to the extensive demands. The pressures of the work, absence of regulation over one's own performance, non-cooperative working set-sups, confined scope of job prospects, influence of ambiguity, reutilized shift job, and the work that demands to cope with the machines are regarded as the occupational distresses that are prescribed to be the elements giving rise to the psychological disorders. The process of burnouts generates serious costs for both the employees and the organizations. The employee with the burnout problem has much adverse impact in terms of emotional and physical disorders that perpetually declines the productivity to perform the job effectively. The workload of all the staff associated with medical profession has been observed to have considerably increased. Callan has observed that the introduction of radical variation to organizational structure and activity is highly pressurizing the employees as a result of related influences like job loss or the relocation of employees within the organization. The pressure that is associated with modification, reorganization and curtailment is also inevitable and sometimes they directly influence most of the employees. The nursing professionals are to more conscious about the approval and recognition of their duties and capacities by the clients and providers of healthcare. Even though there are challenges to the profession of nursing; it also offers a large amount of significant benefits.

The PRO-POSITION

The pros of the nursing profession include the intense realization of self-contentment out of service to mankind on the one hand and the financial gains on the other hand. A career in nursing entails the scope to assist and care for people within the medical purview along with a gratifying and varied career having job prospects with within the nation and beyond the national boundaries. Nursing entails an opportunity to differentiate; some job types have an immediate rewarding as nurses can brilliantly visualise the people to progress due to what is being done. It entails a scope to visualise nature of human beings and analyse individuals; a scope to be among the people at significant junctures in their lives.

At a moment when so many opportunities are available to women in all sorts of work, it is significant that nursing has a specific benefit as a career. It is fairly a new profession. It is only since the inception of the century that nurses have been counted in the thousands. Even though there are still many enviable top positions in the various fields the salary of the nurses is compared favourably with those for woman in other fields. The prospects for the graduate nurses have never been so promising. Nursing presently presents wide variations in the specialisations to work in along with being attached to a profession in high demand both now and in the future. New avenues have been created, remunerations have been improved and the nurses are deployed in communities and in specific services that have not been provided with nursing care before. Industrial nursing signifies one of the fastest growing fields. In the factory the nurse assists in providing care facilities for minor injuries and also provides much needed health information to the men and women workers. This information assists in avoiding the illnesses that are sometimes accountable for absenteeism, and produces serious harms and interferes with production. There is a wide expansion and growth rate is ever increasing in the field of Army and Navy Nurse Corps as also in the civilian hospital and public health agencies are requiring more nurses than ever before. The role of the nurses has been influenced absolutely by the fact that nursing is cheaper than any other profession. With the advent of the concept of the managed care and the growth of capitated agreements, along with consideration of the fact that Nurse Practitioners are to perform about 80% of the procedures particularly performed by the Primary Care Physicians at a much cheaper cost have enhanced their demand in the recent years.

However, the scarcity of the nursing population is being visualised through the whole nation. There is a rapid growth in the fraction of the elderly age group, which necessitates the most important health facilities. By the end of the year 2008, the Bureau of Labour statistics forecast our requirement of 450,000 additional certified nurses so as to meet the present needs. Such requirement ignores the fact that during the period, 78 million baby boomers will also be suitable for the Medicare. The influence of the shortfall of nurses is awful. To illustrate, the hospitals may not be able to plan surgeries on a regular level and there may not be sufficient nurses for emergency departments where many patients would have to be admitted. The new deployments are not sufficient to keep up with the persistently growing demand for nursing workforce that is gradually increasing in age. The fact of the shortfall in the field of nursing has attracted the attention of everyone that is influenced by the health organizations. Many efforts are attempted at the levels of hospitals and policy decision-making to find a remedy to such a rapidly increasing issue.

Nursing is considered to be a very transferable and coveted profession. Nursing provides the alternatives to perform either full-time or part-time employment, even contractual or regular deployments. Nursing also has the flexibility to modify the work to suit the lifestyle needs. Nursing service is so intricately related with the medical sciences on the one hand and in the other with the problems concentrating on family health that almost any ability that the nurse has external to ones profession would also assist in her professional work. Nurses that have the personal inclinations and abilities to cook or sew or keep house, sometimes have real recommendations to offer to the patients they attend in their course of duty.

Most of us have the inclination to teach when we have the intense interest on the subject, and nurses are able to teach many of their patients or the relatives of the patients on leading better standards of living, a more appropriate selection of diet or the means of safeguarding the individuals from infection. Since nursing service is so widely applied, nurses mostly choose their area of operation that they like most to be engaged and have the flexibility to move from place to place so as to acclaim more professional experience as a result of interests outside their immediate work or in consequence to the family liabilities. No other profession of women seems to acclaim so much universal demand. Nurses perform their job in almost all portions of the country, irrespective of the locality of cities, small towns or remote rural districts. Nurses are also required in many of the foreign countries for assisting the rehabilitation programs.

My Position take the Pro-position of nursing. The proposals of nursing deserve deep observation. Nursing is considered to be a varied and flexible area of study. Traditionally the age old image of nursing has been infused into our minds for a very long period of time but actually such ideology is rapidly seen vanishing over a period of time. The goal of the nurses is not confined only to assist the doctors in their practice. Contrary to this the nurses are not at all dependent on doctors and nursing is taken to be an isolated and all-inclusive field of activity in itself. Nursing is considered to be an essential portion of health care. However, the other common fallacy is that people normally attach the profession of nursing to only the females. This is however quite wrong. Most of the people normally have a derogatory impression on the male groups those are studying nursing and are totally have an undesirable feeling upon them. However, male nurses are observed to be equally competent as that of the female nurses.