Importance of nursing advocacy
Nursing advocacy is an act of nurses defending both the rights and properties of their patients. Nurses are in a position to protect their patient’s interests, be a part of their decision making, and represent the vulnerable. Since patients spend most of their time with nurses, it means that they should both develop a good relationship full of trust and respect. Nurses are better positioned to be the patient’s advocates since they are the immediate caregivers who experience the healthcare system’s limitations. For this reason, the nurses need to be vocal and be aware of avenues to address these issues, both internally and external environment of the facility, to promote changes that can benefit both the patients and the facility as a whole.
In addition to the discussion above, we can state that nursing advocacy is essential for developing the nurse-patient relationship. The nurse and a patient eventually develop a unique bond during the time they spend together, thus giving proper insight into how the patient and families would wish to be treated. Developing such a bond brings in trustworthiness, whereby the patients will share some essential conditions with their nurses that they cannot voice them out. In this case, the nurse will be responsible for advocating either psychosocial or physiological needs for their patient.
With the nursing advocacy technique’s help, nurses are in a position to speak up while serving on committees or councils to solve any problems in the facility and ensure that patients receive the best available services. Nursing advocacy will thus improve the leadership approach and environment around nurses and their patients. Therefore, in such a case, we can say that nursing advocacy can open more opportunities for a significant working relationship, which improves both the internal environment between healthcare workers and the external between the nurses and patients.
Nursing advocacy brings in healthcare fairness for all patients.
Regarding the ethical code, every nurse must take care of all the patients with respect and compassionately. In this case, all the patients will be taken care of regardless of their economic status and other personal attributes or nature of their health problems. It, therefore, the responsibility of every nurse to ensure equal access to care. Every individual deserves to access the same level of medical attention and compassion about their conditions. The act of advocacy encourages other nurses not to discriminate against patients by modelling this principle by themselves.
Nursing advocacy alleviates suffering.
Unfortunately, many cases are showing suffering patients in the healthcare setting. Since nurses have a responsibility to advocate for the patients, they need to be addressing such issues for healthcare officials to inspect the levels of discomfort and relative suffering. They are suffering in this case come in two categories: in the form of injury, diseases, illness, and diagnosis. The other category consists of treatment and problems resulting from the cause of the facility. Therefore, it is the responsibility of nurses to advocate for these patients’ pain management to reduce their physical suffering.
Advocacy enables the promotion of human dignity.
As we have seen earlier, nurses spend most of their time serving the patients directly. Thus, it is their responsibility to pay attention and preserve human dignity by maintaining the patient’s privacy, respect, and autonomy. All the nurses should abide by their patient’s request concerning healthcare preference and remind the patients that they have control over their bodies—nurses to respect the patients by not talking down to them factually or figuratively. For private matters, nurses need to discuss such matters discreetly, thus showing respect and modesty even when addressing higher authority.
Nursing advocacy helps in growing nurse’s leadership skills.
When the nurses are well informed on how the system works, and the strategies that can effectively influence them can influence any policy, they become advocates of the patients and local, state, or federal levels. Advocating for patients in forms such as; committee addressing testifying and making phone calls makes someone involved in a facility’s successful functioning, thus upgrading an individual’s practices and statues in the workplace or running for elected office. Most facilities offer a range of resources that demystify processes, thus enabling the nurses to analyze and share their legislations and opinions.
Safeguards the community
It is the community’s healthcare nursing role to promote, preserve, and protect the public’s health. In such a case, healthcare workers need to advocate for the following aspects. Nurses need to advocate for healthcare services availability by showing direct care, conducting healthcare improvements, promoting a healthy lifestyle, and creating awareness of any contiguous diseases. The role of community healthcare nurses is to ensure treatment for all the patients and educate them on maintaining a healthy and useful life. Such advocacy helps decrease the occurrence of diseases and deaths of the members of the community.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we see that nurses’ responsibility is to advocate for their patients in critical ways. Therefore, being a nurse entails several responsibilities: communicators, caregivers, liaisons, educators, and interpreters. Such responsibilities bring out nurses as superheroes since they fight for their patient’s justice, especially those who are vulnerable, the ones who require strengths and compassion. The American Nurses Association is a code of ethics that makes it possible for the nurses to advocate for patient’s rights, safety, and health.