A greater amount of importance is given to the process of informed consent today. In this aspect the nurses could be available to educate and motivate the patient regarding their treatment. The nurse should be available to inform the patient about their condition, and the means by which it could be diagnosed and treated appropriately. All the options available for the treatment of the patient’s condition should be present by the nurse in a simplified and easy to understand manner. Besides, they should also present the benefits and the risk of the treatment option to the patient.
The patient should feel free to make informed decisions about their treatment. The nurse should not be available to play a role in the place of the physician’s advice, but should be available to supplement the physician’s advice. This would definitely help improve the quality of care provided in the hospitals. With the advent of modern technology, several aspects of healthcare have changed drastically. Today the healthcare personnel are able to use much more effective devices which would not only be able to treat the patient and improve the health outcomes, but also be able to more efficiently monitor the condition of the patient.
The use of electronic medical records (EMR’s) in hospitals is an urgent and immediate felt need. Through imposition of this challenge not only would the physicians have to work hard, but also the nurses and other healthcare specialists. Nurses and physicians should not only be available to provide innovative ideas for the imposition of EMR’s but also to actually be compliant with using such tools to deliver efficient healthcare.
A greater amount of participation of nurses, physicians and specialists in developing the EMR software tools today, would help to better and more efficiently face the challenges of tomorrow. Today, hospitals are struggling throughout the world due to acute shortages of nurses. These nurses are facing a very high workload. They are given greater amount of patients to handle by the physicians and the specialists. If this demand for nurses is not met today, then in tomorrow’s world nurses would be overburdened with a very heavy patient load. This would have a very serious role to play on the quality of patient care.
The government, nursing associations, hospital organizations, nursing schools, etc, should step in and develop effective policies so that the manner in which the human resources are obtained could be improved. More nursing schools need to be organized so that the shortages can be met. Besides, the stakeholders need to discuss the potential problems that could develop due to a shortage in the human resources in the future. These parties need to develop a far-sight so that so when the time comes, the problems can be better managed (Vanderwolf, 2006).