Essay on "Professional Image and Nurses Unions"

Essay 5 pages (1673 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Nursing

Professional Image and Nurses' Unions

Professional Image and Nurses' Unions - Discuss Pros and Cons

A union is an association that brings together dissimilar people in the same line of work. There are many unions in the medical and health care professions. Nursing labor unions have become tremendously visible in the past decade generally due to their objectives of attaining better wages and working environments for their members, and enhanced nurse-to-patient relations (Estlund, 2010).

Nursing unions are fashioned with the purpose of providing nurses a resource to deal with concerns and troubles that come with the line of work. While proponents for nursing unions feel they give nurses more of a voice and more authority in their vocation, there are others who feel unions, even though well-intentioned, just bring additional problems to the workplace. Nursing unions work to help advance the pay and working circumstances of nurses. The principal reason for poor working circumstances is a continuous scarcity of nurses. A scarcity of nurses means too many patients are allocated to one nurse, making the job hard. When nurses become overworked, they are forced to put in overtime and doing tasks that aren't normally connected with nursing like retrieving records and billing. With the authority of a union behind them, nurses can bargain for contracts that plainly define duties and hours. Unions also assist nurses negotiate for pay scales and benefits that mirror the amount of work they put into the average day. Some hospital executives think that nursing unions are destructive to working relationships between nurses and their hospital managers. Collective bargaining has both positive and negative components. With collective bargaining, nurses have somebody working with employers to fashion pay scales, benefit packages, nurse-to-patient ratios and role classifications that favor nurses spelled out in the form of an obligatory contract. Yet, collective bargaining can in the end reduce pay at some later point in time (Harris, 2010).

Discuss how Nurses' Unions impact the profession of nursing.

When it comes to working circumstances and cuts, nurses across the nation have more and more become the bleeding heart of the healthcare system. And the degenerating conditions faced by the single largest segment of the healthcare workforce have elevated the stakes for unionization and collective bargaining fights in that segment. A year ago nurses and their unions were in the middle of the fight in regards to healthcare reform, with many lobbying for the public option or single-payer at a time when the White House had already removed those choices from the table (Tierney, 2011).

What in the end passed as reform will boost, rather than get rid of, the private health insurance industry as the central arbiter of who gets care and who doesn't. But with millions forced into private health insurance plans, the flood of new patients will intensify the need for nurses. The growth of employment opportunity in nursing that is probable over the next decade will increase the nursing sector and could transform to more authority for nurses, if they are organized. Presently, twenty one percent of registered nurses in the nation are union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From an organizing standpoint, this realism raises the stakes for unionization labors among nurses (Tierney, 2011).

With its most recent victory, the National Nurses Union is building on its membership of nurses across the nation. NNU is a new national arrangement that was created with the merger of a number of smaller and largely state-based unions. This unification indicated a break from nurse unionism's more disjointed history, offering the prospective of a more authoritative voice for nurses countrywide. NNU also represents a more confrontational alternative to the other large nurses' organization, the National Federation of Nurses, which is associated with the American Nurses Association and its weakness for partnerships with administration (Tierney, 2011).

Discuss how Nurses' unions impact safety outcomes.

Frontline managers frequently have a harder time influencing change and attaining preferred outcomes in a unionized setting. Inexperienced nurse leaders are often scared to take essential disciplinary actions against staff who are involved in patient safety situations because of likely union ramifications and threats by the staff to go to the union. There is a widespread misconception that unions must be conferred with prior to taking essential precautions to guard patients (Roe, 2011).

In one example an experienced ICU nurse put a patient at risk by unsuitably applying restraints. The nurse had gotten buy-in from her peers before applying the restraints in an effort to handle a troublesome patient. After the situation was brought to management's attention, the patient care manager met with the ICU nurse who agreed that she had not followed guidelines and that the patient could have died. She was very distressed with herself and accepted a suspension while a full investigation took place. Within minutes of the nurse's suspension, the CNO called the patient care manager very angry that the union wasn't checked with prior to the suspension. She was convinced that the organization would be in trouble with the union. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The requirement to consult with unions on patient security issues prior to taking corrective action is a myth held by a lot of nurse leaders and can frequently prevent them from taking essential actions. In reality when the patient care manager contacted the local union authority he highly praised her management of the incident. He was very troubled that the other nurses did not distinguish their responsibility to protect people and would stand by and watch poor practice and not intercede. As a consequence, the union provided obligatory in-service for members on responsibility and peer accountabilities (Roe, 2011).

Many hospitals are striving to achieve Magnet status. Discuss how this model promotes standards for professional nursing practice.

Magnet status is an honor given by the American Nurses' Credentialing Center (ANCC), a partner of the American Nurses Association, to hospitals that meet a set of criterion intended to gauge the power and excellence of their nursing. A Magnet hospital is thought to be one where nursing distributes outstanding patient outcomes, where nurses have an elevated height of job satisfaction, and where there is a low staff nurse turnover rates and suitable complaint declaration. Magnet status is also said to designate nursing participation in data collection and decision-making in patient care delivery. The suggestion is that Magnet nursing leaders' value staff nurses, engage them in determining research-based nursing practice, and promote and compensate them for progress in nursing practice. Magnet hospitals are thought to have open communique between nurses and other associates of the health care team, and a suitable staff mix to reach the best patient outcomes and work atmosphere (What is Magnet status and how's that whole thing going, 2008).

Magnet status isn't an award or a prize but rather it's a feat driven acknowledgment credential. Attaining it brings exterior prestige along with wide ranging internal benefits. Taking the Journey to Magnet Excellence has been shown to have a remarkable impact on quality, service, expenditure, and human resource dealings. It allows healthcare organizations to: endorse quality in a setting that upholds professional clinical practice, recognize superiority in the delivery of nursing services to patients and offer an apparatus for distributing best practices in nursing services. Studies have shown Magnet hospitals have superior proportions of content registered nurses, lower nurse turnover and vacancy, enhanced clinical outcomes, better nurse sovereignty, and enhanced patient satisfaction (Drenkard, 2010).

Does the model of shared governance promote excellence in nursing practice? Discuss Pros and Cons.

The Shared Governance model allows for a chance for Registered Nurses to share thoughts, solve troubles and have a say in issues that affect their work. Shared Governance is also a manner to advance the lines of communication between units and other departments, since… READ MORE

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