Resources & Guides for Nurses

Advocacy is woven deeply into the nurse practitioner role. It’s a part of the job that’s never finished. Advocacy can occur at a micro level, by advocating one-on-one for a particular patient, or at the macro level, by lobbying for policy changes; it’s often a mix of the two. For many NPs, advocacy is about an issue close to their heart, one connected to underserved patients who deserve additional support. For two NP experts, the issue is children and youth in foster care.

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.

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.

The nurse would start with an assessment, form a nursing diagnosis, and start their plan. Afterward, they would implement the planned nursing interventions and evaluate if they led to optimal patient outcomes.

Nurse practitioners and other nursing professionals operate in a diverse landscape of cultures and languages. Understanding a patient’s cultural background and language proficiency is essential to effective healthcare delivery. It fosters mutual respect and trust and enhances patient satisfaction and adherence to treatment plans. However, not all nurses are aware of the importance of cultural and linguistic awareness.

Nurse practitioners still participate in traditional recruitment and hiring processes despite the high demand for their services. Job interviews remain the de facto standard for health systems, hospitals, private practices, and clinics seeking to retain the services of an NP.

A nurse instructor requires experienced nurses to take their knowledge and skills in nursing and translate them into lessons that help student nurses. Their goal is to provide high-quality training for nurses that promotes safe and effective patient care.

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.

Recent survey results show that a quarter to half of nurses feel emotionally drained, used up, fatigued, and burned out several times a week, or even every day (NCSBN 2023). Nearly a fifth of the current nursing workforce has stated their intent to leave the profession by 2027, with a significant portion of those statements coming from nurses under 40. With an aging population and an ongoing need for healthcare services, America can’t afford to lose this much of its vital nursing workforce.

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.