Professional nursing holds a unique place in the American health care system. As members of the largest health care profession, the nation’s 3.1 million nurses work in diverse settings and fields and are frontline providers of health care services. While most nurses work in acute-care settings such as hospitals, nurses’ expertise and skills extend well beyond hospital walls. Working independently and with other health care professionals, nurses promote the health of individuals, families, and communities. Millions of Americans turn to nurses for delivery of primary health care services, health care education. and health advice and counseling. Nurses are critical links in maintaining a cutting-edge health care system.Nursing continues to be an indispensable service to the American public. Show
Florence Nightingale Nursing and Hospital Care in the United States
The Beginnings of Nurse Education
The outbreak of the Civil War created an immediate need for capable nurses to care for the enormous number of sick and wounded. About 20,000 women and men served as nurses in both the North and the South. The commendable service rendered by Civil War nurses provided a rationale for future experiments in setting up training programs for nursing. One such program was initiated in Pennsylvania where the Women’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered a six months nurse training course, which graduated its first class in 1869. Similar courses, such as that offered by the New England Hospital for Women and Children were begun in other locales. Professional Nurse Education Begins
The Profession of Nursing Organizes As the number of nurses grew in the late nineteenth century, nursing took on the rudimentary characteristics of a profession. In the 1890s, nurses organized two major professional associations: the American Society of Superintendents of Training
Schools for Nurses, later renamed the National League of Nursing Education, and the Associated Alumnae of
These changes improved and reformed many aspects of the nurse training system, but problems remained. Reflecting the social and legal status of African Americans at the time, American professional nursing maintained strict racial segregation until the mid-twentieth century. African American individuals wanting to become nurses had to train in a separate educational system and faced a divided employment field in which white and black nurses did not participate equally. Nursing also remained a predominantly female profession. While a few schools admitted men, most schools refused them admission. Challenges for NursingEmployment conditions for nurses also presented challenges. In the early part of the twentieth century, hospitals employed only a few graduate nurses, mainly in supervisory positions. They relied instead on student nurses for the majority of the bedside care provided to patients. Most nurses, once they graduated from their educational program, entered the field of private duty nursing. Private duty nurses were employed by individual patients primarily in their homes. As institutions became the more normative site for delivery of sick care, private duty nurses moved with their patients into the hospital, delivering care to hospitalized individuals who could afford to pay for their own nurse. But for nurses, private duty often did not provide regular and dependable employment; nurses were hired on an ad hoc basis by patients and were oftentimes without a regular source of income. The cost of private duty was also quite high, limiting the number of patients employing private duty nurses. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that hospitals hired nurses as regular staff on a permanent basis, providing full professional nursing services to all hospitalized patients. Nursing DiversifiesDespite the many difficulties within the profession, nursing continued to grow as an occupational field and became recognized as an essential health care service by the early twentieth century. Nurses fanned out into diverse fields delivering services to many people outside of hospitals. For example, Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement House in 1893, which provided nursing and other social services to impoverished populations on the Lower East Side of New York City. Replication of Wald’s work in other parts of the country led to the growth of the field of public health nursing, opening up new employment opportunities for nurses and expanding the type of services provided by nurses.
The special skills possessed by nurses were easily transferred to different fields of health care. For example, nurses were educated to administer anesthesia during surgery, leading to the specialty field of nurse anesthetists. By the early twentieth century it was quite common to find nurse anesthetists delivering anesthesia in many of the nation’s hospitals. By the 1920s, in some parts of the country, nurse-midwives delivered babies, in many cases to the most impoverished populations.
Mid-twentieth Century Nursing
At the same time, internal debates within the profession over the type of work in which nurses should engage and the proper way to educate a nurse divided nurses into different camps. Some educators and other health care The community college movement achieved only partial success. Community college programs did graduate many new nurses and often at a lower cost than traditional diploma programs. But, as the needs of late-twentieth-century patients became increasingly more complex, research studies indicated that being treated by nurses prepared at the baccalaureate level improved patient outcomes. The Modern Practice of Nursing
Nursing education also thrived in the latter half of the twentieth century. Significant federal financial support for educating nurses, which became available beginning in the 1960s, permitted the revamping and modernizing of many nursing educational programs. Significantly, increased funding for nursing research permitted nursing to develop a sounder scientific basis for its practice. Nurse researchers today carry out cutting-edge studies that shed light on the ways and means of solving many health care problems and improving nursing services.
Historically, the nursing profession has consistently demonstrated its ability to adapt to changing and varied health care needs. It remains an exceedingly popular and highly respected profession that attracts large numbers of new recruits to its ranks. There is little doubt that nursing will continue to maintain its status as an extremely important profession, serving the health needs of the nation. Jean C. Whelan (1949-2017) was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. What is an important need for public health informatics regarding data collection?The availability of data and speed of data exchange can have a significant impact on critical public health functions, such as disease monitoring and syndromic surveillance.
When nursing professionals work with information and generate information and knowledge as a product they can be described as quizlet?Knowledge workers: those who work with information and generate information and knowledge as a product.
When nursing professionals work with information and generate information and knowledge as a product they can be described as which of the following?Nursing informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice.
What is the most reliable source of research evidence for informing practice?The most reliable source of research evidence for informing practice is: Qualitative research on a practice intervention provides insights into: the cost effectiveness of the intervention.
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