Role of Nurse Leaders in Improving Health Outcomes Essay Paper

Discuss the most personally meaningful key points you have learned over the past eight weeks about the impact of grassroots policy initiatives and the role of nurse leaders in improving health outcomes and/or impacting barriers to practice by their engagement in policy processes  Role of Nurse Leaders in Improving Health Outcomes Essay Paper

Advancing the Cause

The role of nurse leaders in improving health outcomes is immense. This impact is usually felt at the grassroots level where policy initiatives make their largest impression. By default, advanced practice nurses (APNs) train to meet a deficit of clinicians at the grassroots level who should be offering the most basic primary health care (PHC) at an affordable cost. Most of these populations at the grassroots level are underserved minority and marginalized communities affected negatively by the social determinants of health or SDOH. These SDOH include low socioeconomic status (low household incomes), low educational achievement, poor sanitation and living conditions, and lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare services (Powell, 2016). Because of this, the nurse leader focuses on policy initiatives that stem from this community level. It is only by doing so that the community’s voice can be heard and their pressing concerns addressed adequately. The purpose f this paper is to discuss the meaningful lessons learnt over the past eight weeks in this context.

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Meaningful Key Points Learnt

In this past eight weeks, the meaningful key points that I have personally learnt with regard to the role of the nurse leader in grassroots policy advocacy are as follow:

• That favorable policy changes are required more at the community level as this is where the vulnerable populations are found. These are underserved populations that are disadvantaged in every other way. For these populations, a small policy change usually has a large impact on them.
• That populations at the grassroots level are the needy subjects that require help and support with healthcare costs and access. Because advocacy involves politics, the nurse leader must engage in politicking and political gimmicks to achieve the goal of making the policy makers aware that policy change is indeed required to address the plight of the vulnerable (Mason et al., 2016; Milstead & Short, 2019).
• That the nurse leader and nurses in general must be effective communicators and good listeners to community members who are their patients and clients. These form a goldmine of information that is helpful in making community diagnosis.

Impacting Barriers to Practice

The advocacy engaged in by the nurse leader is not only for favorable policies for the community alone. It is also for policies that make practice more doable for the nurses by alleviating unnecessary barriers. The biggest barrier to practice is restriction on the status of practice (practice environment) by some states that still refuse to grant full practice authority (FPA) to advanced practice nurses or APNs (Dillon & Gary, 2017). As has been stated in the introduction, the underserved communities at the grassroots level only have APNs to depend on for all their healthcare needs.

Physicians by choice always want to practice in large metropolitan areas and often avoid practicing in rural grassroots areas. Denying APNs the freedom to practice autonomously therefore only hurts these grassroots communities that are underserved. This is because the only group of healthcare professionals that they depend on is still restricted in what they can do and are forced to be supervised by practicing physicians. Nurse leaders are therefore working extra hard to have the states with reduced practice and those with restricted practice change their oppressive health policies.

Conclusion

The advocacy carried out by nurse leaders at the grassroots level has a huge impact on the underserved communities that live there. APNs provide the essential primary health care services that are needed by these rural communities in a cost-effective manner. However, there are still some barriers to practice such as the denial of full practice authority by some states. This is an area that the nurse leaders are engaged in politically and professionally to see to it that all states eventually adopt FPA for all APNs.

References

Dillon, D. & Gary, F. (2017). Full practice authority for nurse practitioners. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 41(1), 86-93. https://doi.org/10.1097/naq.0000000000000210

Mason, D.J., Gardner, D.B., Outlaw, F.H., & O’Grady, E.T. (2016). Policy and politics in nursing and healthcare, 7^th ed. Elsevier.

Milstead, J. & Short, N. (2019). Health policy and politics: a nurse’s guide, 6^th ed. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Powell, D.L. (2016). Social determinants of health: Cultural competence is not enough. Creative Nursing, 24(1), 5-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1078-4535.22.1.5

Role of Nurse Leaders in Improving Health Outcomes Essay Paper