The Future of Nursing

Campaign for Action The subject of this brief report is the future of nursing and the associated IOM report on the same subject. As part of this report, there will first be a discussion of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Committee and their work as it pertains to the future of nursing, the Institute of Medicine and so forth. The importance of the IOM's report and how it relates to nursing practice will be covered as well.

The role of state-based action coalitions will be summarized and the author of this report will focus on two initiatives specific to the author's home state, that being Texas. The barriers that exist in the state of Texas will be covered as well as the ways in which nursing advocates can help overcome these barriers. While barriers to improving healthcare will always exist, foundations like the Robert Wood Johnson one and other healthcare advocates will always strive to overcome those barriers and limitations and this is as it should be.

Analysis The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's report about the future nursing has eight recommendations that center on four overall issues. Those issues are as follows: 1) That nurses should practice to the fullest extent of their education and nursing training (RWJF, 2015). 2) Nurses should achieve higher levels of education and other training through an improved educational framework that helps to promote an academic progression that is seamless (RWJF, 2015). 3) Nurses should be full and complete partners in the future of nursing, right up there with physicians and other healthcare professionals (RWJF, 2015).

4) There needs to be effective workforce planning and policy-making surrounding the same so as to enable proper data collection and sufficient information infrastructure (RWJF, 2015). The importance of the report is easy to see. Nursing and the broader practice of medicine is ever-evolving and changing. This includes the depth and breadth of the treatments that exist for diseases. New medicines and medical procedures come very day and technology is advancing at an extremely fast clip.

As such, the four points made above are extremely important to adhere to because the nurses of tomorrow need to be very good at their job, they need to have strict attention to detail and they need to be equal partners, at least in the general sense, with the other stakeholders and decision-makers as everyone involved has a stake in making sure the general direction of medicine and nursing is forward and advancing.

Indeed, the Johnson Foundation website asserts that the value of nursing is related to "building a culture of health." To be sure, a lot of the health-related maladies that people suffer from are due to lifestyle neglect and otherwise bad choices. The only way to reverse those trends and outcomes is to educate patients on how to become or remain health and nurses are currently and shall remain on the front lines of getting that implemented and ingrained into our culture and with the people in it (RWJF, 2015).

The role of state-based coalitions is pretty easy to see and fathom. Indeed, there are going to be regional and other geographical variations between different areas and this means that each individual state must acclimate their nursing and medical culture to the needs of the states. The needs of California, for example, are not going to be the same as Kansas. It is not wrong to say this because it is absolutely true.

The differences between those two states are many including cost of living, the overall terrain, the overall climate, the demographics of the people that live there, the political persuasions of the people that live there, the number of immigrants, the number of people in poverty and other things that all have impacts on the healthcare of those states and how it is delivered (Campaign for Action, 2015).

Regardless of the state involved, one huge part of helping the nursing profession and practice evolve in a state is to present a united front in the form of forming a guiding coalition of likeminded organizations and professionals. The state of Texas is doing precisely that in the form of the Texas AC. This organization achieved a rather major milestone in October 2013 when it brought on its 300th member.

The Texas AC keeps its organization and network strong in the form of maintaining a list of active members, a one-page paper that describes the coalition, applications for businesses and healthcare organizations and a logo to help create a sense of community and that can be touted and shown by the same. Another initiative, also involving the Texas AC, is the idea of having a nursing executive.

Indeed, there is a fairly nascent yet strong movement that asserts that the highest nursing manager in an organization should be a C-Level executive, right up there with the chief physician, CFO and CEO of a hospital or other healthcare organization. The increasing prominence of nursing at the table of power as well as the increased unity of nursing professionals in general both serve to advance the profession (Campaign for Action, 2015).

As for the barriers that exist, one major barrier that exists in Texas is the fact that there are a lot of Latinos from Mexico, other parts of Central America and South America. A lot of these people only speak Spanish and a lot of nurses do not know Spanish, or at least do not know it well enough to be conservational and sufficiently clinical. One way this is being addressed is an increased emphasis on nurses being bilingual.

Nurses that are bilingual are often paid more and are more sought after in states where non-English speakers are prevalent like California, Arizona and Texas. While it would optimal for these immigrants to learn and speak English, nurses need to focus on the idea that these people need to be treated and helped as much as is needed and if that means that the organization makes a heavy and concerted effort to have many Spanish-speakers on-hand, then that is what it takes.

Another barrier would be the disparate political opinions that exist when it comes to healthcare. For example, Austin.