How Does The Health Reforms Affect The Nursing Profession

By Author: Henry Ford
Total Articles: 189
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The recently introduced healthcare reforms have been hailed as a milestone in the history of United States healthcare sectors. For many years, there have been unsuccessful attempts to introduce healthcare reforms, but the attempts have ended up futile. Healthcare reforms are poised to make healthcare more affordable and accessible especially to low income citizens who have for a long time feared for their health because of the escalating cost of healthcare (White House, 2010). The newly introduced healthcare reforms are meant to make healthcare system more sustainable, stabilize family and federal budgets, and the economy in general.
Healthcare reforms are meant to make insurance more affordable by providing largest middle class tax cut for healthcare. It is also meant to reduce premium costs for millions of families and owners of small business who have found it difficult to couple with escalating cost of healthcare. The healthcare reforms are therefore meant to help more than 32 million Americans who have been unable to afford healthcare to access coverage because it has been made more affordable (White House, 2010). ...
... Under the new plan, it is estimated that more than 95% of Americans will be insured.
The new healthcare law will put in place a new very competitive health insurance market that will give millions of Americans same choice of insurance that are accessed by members of congress. This means that the new healthcare law will bring about more equity in the country. It is also aimed at bringing about greater accountability to healthcare because it will introduce rules that will keep premiums down and also prevent the insurance industry from abusing and denying healthcare to clients. This implies that under the new healthcare law, there will be no discrimination against Americans who live with pre-existing conditions, a situation that has been used to deny most Americans affordable healthcare.
Statistics also shows that the new healthcare law will put the budget on the more stable path. It is poised to reduce budget deficit by more than $100 billion within one decade and this will increased to more than $1 trillion in the second decade (White House, 2010). This will be achieved through cutting on government overspending and also reining on wastage, fraud, and abuse. This is important considering that the economy has been badly affected by the recent economic crisis and it needs to be on the recovery path.
Therefore, healthcare reforms will bring about a number of changes in the healthcare sector. It will increase the number of people seeking for healthcare as more people will not be barred from accessing healthcare. In the short and long term, it means that will be increased demand for healthcare service. The government will have to revolutionize the healthcare sector in order to meeting increased need for healthcare services (White House, 2010). While the government plans to save in healthcare spending, it will have to inject more capital to improve healthcare sector, especially on infrastructure and medical equipments.
The new healthcare law will also increase demand for human resource to provide the increased number of patients seeking healthcare service. Healthcare system in the United States is currently being faced by a number of challenges one of them being lack of enough human resources. Since the second half of the twentieth century, staff shortage in healthcare sector has become a major problem. In consideration of the impact of healthcare reforms on medical human resource, the most controversial issue in staffing of nursing finds a centre stage in this discussion. Nurse shortage has been a prevalent problem in the country and it is evident that the problem will be aggravated with the new healthcare reform. In a bid to fight nurse shortage, nurses have come with models that are aimed at mitigating current challenges in nursing care. The implementation of new healthcare reforms will definitely bring more challenges to nurses. It is worth noting that nurses have been tackling healthcare problems that are designed to be revolutionized in the new healthcare reform, that of improving quality and affordable healthcare for all people.
There are many issues that have negatively impacted on the nursing profession that will be fully addressed under the healthcare reform. This means that while the new healthcare reforms are likely to increase the number of people seeking healthcare services thereby adding more pressure to nurses, this may be counteracted by sweeping changes that will be implemented under the new healthcare reforms that will mitigate pressure on nurses. The most vital healthcare issues as can be diagnosed by nurses include the more than 50 million Americans who are not insured and who are likely to be rushed to hospital with need for emergency services, the exclusion of individuals who have pre-existing condition in the mainstream healthcare insurance which makes their conditions more challenging for nurses to handle especially when they are at an advanced stage, financial wastage in Medicare and Medicaid that has made it difficult for most hospitals to hire more healthcare staff, escalating healthcare costs and drop of quality of healthcare, and many other challenges like shortage of nurses (McGuire, 2010). These are pertinent issues in healthcare sector that echo in the years of every nurse in the country who has more contact with patients than other healthcare professionals.
The new healthcare reforms will ease the work in patient care which means safe staffing for nurse. The new healthcare reforms will make healthcare available to most uninsured Americans (McGuire, 2010). Given time, this will most likely reduce the pressure on nursing workload because people who fall sick will access healthcare services at the most appropriate time. This constant flow of patients will reduce episodes of emergency care and hence ease the workload burden on nurse. Although most nurses would like to see mandatory ratio of nurse to patient included in the healthcare reform, there is are important provisions that are likely to mitigate the issue of staffing ratio.
The problem of staffing ratio in our hospitals does not arise from lack of funds in our hospital as most people have point out. There are hospitals that have funds lying idle but they have not been able to get nurses to hire. This means that the problem emanates from training. Evidently, there is inadequate funding for nursing education. This issue has been well addressed under the healthcare reforms. Title VIII and section 5301 of the healthcare reform provides for creation of federal funds that that will be used in nurse education. This means that for the first time, the government will be compelled to increase funding for nurse education and hence increase the number of nurses leaving schools. In addition, section 5301 also creates special grants for hospitals and academically affiliated physician assistant programs to educate more nurses. This section is likely to have a lot of impact on nursing (McGuire, 2010). Experts have shown that the most possible strategy that can be used to increase the number of nurse in hospitals is through educating more nurses to replace the retiring ones. Statistics estimate that the problem of nursing shortage may be aggravated by 2020 but with the provisions of the new healthcare reforms, this problem may be tackled right from the bottom because the country will no longer rely on foreign trained nurses.
Apart from increasing the number of nurses, section 5301 also provides for far reaching provision of nursing services (McGuire, 2010). This section provides that funds will be allocated for nurses to provide in-home care for poor and elderly. This is a positive move that will address one of the major problems affecting healthcare in the country. The poor and the elderly who cannot afford to stay in hospital due to increased cost have been left to suffer at home while those who have been lucky have accessed service in elderly homes. The poor are therefore left to stay and home without necessary nursing services. This provision will definitely increase the demand for nursing care but the healthcare reforms, through the same section provides for provision of funds to train more nurses, which means the increased demand for nurses will be met by increased trained nurses.
The healthcare reforms also focus on improving the primary preventative healthcare. This means that there will be more focus on primary healthcare rather then curative healthcare (McGuire, 2010). Focus on primary healthcare will reduce the number of people seeking curative healthcare which means the burden on nursing care will be mitigated. It will reduce the incidence of emergency care and critical care which have driven the cost of healthcare up.

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