Expert Interviews, Guides & Advocacy Issues in Nursing

The decision to switch careers is a significant one. It’s an opportunity for someone unhappy with their current path to align their professional life with their personal values. For those who identify as empaths drawn to a career that offers learning, growth, and the chance to make a real difference, nursing could be their calling.

Coined by the Nursing Executive Centre of the Advisory Board, the experience-complexity gap describes the dangerously widening difference between the average nurse’s knowledge today and the rapidly increasing complexity of the patients they serve and the technology they must oversee. Put simply, patients have never been sicker, the technology required to keep them alive has never been more involved, and the nurses overseeing their care have never been less knowledgeable and experienced, through no fault of their own.

Under popular value-based care models, nursing rates are wrapped into the bigger hospital bill, making their contributions to business revenue invisible. Hospitals are rewarded for understaffing nurses because nurses are viewed as a cost in this financial model, no different than the gauze they use to wrap a wound or the IV pole they hang medications on.

The state of the crisis in nursing cannot be overstated, but the solutions are equally transparent. US nursing began its downfall when we yielded our power, expertise, and compassion to the unending and equally unearned confidence of the hordes of upper-class white women who told us we needed to be saved from ourselves.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted several problems in how health systems staff their facilities, with one of the starkest consequences being the wage discrepancy between core nursing staff and travel nurses.

While a nursing job in the US is often advertised as the start of a new American dream for these nurses, many find the experience a nightmare instead, thanks to the profoundly exploitative business practices many international recruitment agencies employ.

Given that nurses are among the clinicians who face high rates of exposure to these types of stress, it’s reasonable to ask what role nursing could play in avoiding or preventing insurance denials. It turns out that the research shows there are many steps that nurses can take to reduce the probability that their patients will experience an insurance company’s denial of care.

The prevailing powers of the age write history. Because patriarchy has predominated for the past 12,000 years, that also means most of modern history was arbitrated and recorded by men.

Transitioning from nursing school into clinical practice has always challenged new nurses. According to one study published in Nursing Economics, 17 percent of new graduate nurses leave the profession entirely within one year. To combat this trend, hospitals and nursing education organizations have created new graduate nurse residency programs to serve as a bridge between the classroom and the hospital, better-supporting nurses and making the process easier and less daunting.

Despite Nightingale’s beliefs that nursing was the duty of “proper ladies,” the dire need for skilled nursing care led to the proliferation of nursing programs that predominantly served poor and working-class women who wanted a respectable profession. In fact, nursing education in America was founded in part to empower and employ lower-class women.