Nursing education
Nursing has always seemed to be a profession in which the nurse is the follower of the doctor such as their personal minion only doing the nominal things that the doctor does not want to do. However in Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing and the article “Quality and Nursing” by Hall, Moore, and Barnsteiner you can see that nurses can have a much larger impact on the healthcare system. In Nightingale’s book the author takes an in-depth look at nursing and exclaims that it should not be the mere, “administration of medicines and application of poultices” (Florence 2). The article “Quality and Nursing” looks into what nursing is and the potential it has to make a larger impact on the healthcare system. These two informative pieces make a claim that the nurse’s job has been inhibited by the lack of knowledge of what elements make a good nurse, and that it is time for them to not merely be a follower of a doctor but through better communication and continued education nurses could improve the healthcare system. Patient’s safety is a key issue in both documents and with the right nurse you can increase the efficiency of their safety. Nightingale notes that with “bad sanitary, bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements,” it is impossible for a nurse to work effectively (Florence 2). What the author is trying to say here is that they do not really know how to keep things running in a smooth fashion in a hospital to increase the safety of the patients. This in turn has an adverse affect on the nurses because it keeps nurses from advancing and limits them to simply be administers of medicine and bandages. The author later goes on to reveal that the elements of nursing are really unknown in that the art of nursing has been one that tries to, “unmake what God had made a disease to be, a reparative process” (Florence 2). In contrast the article on “Quality and Nursing,” says that today it is not the lack of knowledge in
Cited: Hall, Leslie W., Shirley M. Moore, and Jane H. Barnsteiner. "Quality And Nursing: Moving From A Concept To A Core Competency." Urologic Nursing 28.6 (2008): 417-425. Academic Search Premier. Web. 19 Feb. 2014. Florence Nightingale. Notes on Nursing. NY. Barnes & Noble, 2003.