Rural Nursing in America Verse Rural Nursing in Africa

Rural Nursing

The first study, by Alexy and Elnitsky, looked at rural American residents over the age of 65 to assess their general health and risk factors. They found clusters of people with similar concerns that limited their ability to function in life and determined that community health interventions should begin well before the age of 65. The second study, by Anyango et. al., surveyed nurses in Uganda to determine whether rural Ugandan nurses felt they had been well prepared for their jobs as rural nurses. This research found that the nurses had to do a lot of supervision and tat they felt unprepared to do so. They struggled with such tasks as prioritizing their work activities.

The two studies looked at the problems of rural nursing in different ways. The assumption in the first study was that the nurses were trained adequately for their jobs and focused on patient needs. The second study focused on the needs of the rural nurses themselves, and those findings suggest that if the patients are to be served well, the nurses providing those services need to be better prepared for the non-nursing demands of their jobs. The Ugandan nurses faced more difficult circumstances as rural nurses because more of the burden of providing medical help falls on them and because rural Uganda is in the grip of a major AIDS epidemic.

Before reading these articles I did not realize that rural nursing could present such significant difficulties. The American nurses were faced with older people who sometimes had not had adequate medical care for years. The patients' needs went beyond nursing care as some struggled with such basic things as paying bills and buying groceries. In addition a significant number of the rural Americans in the study had serious nutritional problems. It was actually quite a shock to read that these elderly patients faced such problems in a country with so many assets.

The rural nurses in Uganda were struggling to deal with enormous public health problems. In addition, Uganda's medical training system is not as well organized as that of the United States, resulting in several paths that can lead to the title of "nurse." Few nurses in Uganda have master's degrees as they have to go to another country for such a program. Although Uganda has a formal program for training visiting nurses, only 10 nurses graduate from it each year.

After reading these articles I realize the importance of good rural nursing care both in modern countries and in third world countries. While the American nurses were rightly concerned about the patients evaluated for the study, the Ugandan rural nurses face monumental problems and must struggle to provide even the most basic needs. They must be terribly overburdened, and it seems there is little professional or psychological support for them.