The diversity of modern-day challenges requires adopting advanced and innovative techniques and skillsets to deal with them. It is also fundamental for nursing professionals to cater to evolving and unprecedented emergencies of the medical field. Currently, nurses are actively introducing, embracing, executing, and integrating innovations in healthcare. That’s how the profession has progressed considerably from mere assistants and helpers to leaders and change-makers since the 19th century.
Additionally, innovation in nursing practices has a tactical significance in modern times. It is essential to augment existing practices and invent effective approaches for improved and sophisticated healthcare. Inventive nurses innovate techniques and methods that facilitate better treatment. Adept and well-informed nurses can participate in decisions and policy-making concerning patients’ welfare and satisfaction. Eventually, they can ensure excellence and inclusivity in healthcare services. Thus innovation in nursing is a necessity to progress and meet diverse requirements. Let’s unravel a few of the prerequisites to embracing innovations in nursing and its implications for the provision of improved health care.
- Augmenting nursing practices
One of the uniformities of the medical field is constantly fine-tuning and developing as per the circumstances. And nurses are required to walk in parallel with the evolutions and modernity. Nurses with primitive level knowledge cannot satisfy present-day demands. Modern-day nursing professionals, like all other professionals, must follow and adapt to the trajectory of innovation. As such, even academic institutes have a dual existence: virtual and physical. Adapting innovation is a means to deal with the constraints effectively. For instance, advanced nursing degree programs like Doctor of Nursing (DNP) have an online presence to minimize spatiotemporal, financial, and accessibility constraints. Thus nursing aspirants are advancing their academic knowledge and readily implementing learned skills in practical settings.
The online dnp programs polish the professional and leadership skills of students and coach students about modern technologies. And online education will enable them to manage their tasks and studies simultaneously. As a result, nurses are capable of exploring, inventing, and practicing refinement in healthcare practices. As such, nurses familiar with modern student management systems are adept at using sophisticated patient monitoring apparatus. In the end, nurses act as primary drivers to ensure society benefits from advanced knowledge and innovation-assisted practices.
- Facilitating healthcare up-gradation
Human history documents nurses’ impact as trailblazers for observing, structuring, and implementing efficient healthcare practices. It is because firsthand interaction with patients enables them to monitor the emerging needs of patients closely. That is how nurses like Rebecca Koszalinski identified and struggled to utilize technology for the care and welfare of disabled patients. Her efforts paved the way to facilitate communication of patients with cerebral palsy by introducing the Speak For Myself digital application.
In addition, nurses serve and strengthen the structure of the healthcare system just like a backbone. They contribute way beyond looking after, caregiving, sympathizing and assisting. Nurses pioneer, implement and lead the advancements in the healthcare system. As a result, it is possible to cure and enhance people’s lives. It means innovative inclinations and aptitude enable nurses to drive health-benefiting transformation in the healthcare system. Consequently, they can facilitate and integrate patient-centric improvements in the healthcare system that serve societies effectively.
- Enhancing quality of patient care
Nurses improve care quality by attending to patient needs and delivering disease-specific services. Since nurses have close contact with patients, they observe conditions, explore effective approaches, and provide personalized care. That is how the sanitary practices of attentive and insightful nurses like Florence Nightingale had prevented several infection-induced deaths during the Crimean war crisis. Her approach and legacy continue to inspire modern-day nurses to eliminate disease-inducing influencers.
As such, a University of Colorado hospital nurse, Samantha Weimer, helped introduce and implement standard protocols to treat wounds involving burns, frostbites, and cathedral-based infections. While improving burn wounds care, she and her team prevented many frostbite severities. Likewise, they reduced cathedral-based infections altogether. In addition, nurses have a significant contribution in expanding the life expectancy of terminally ill patients. Nurses facilitate the remaining days of such patients by embellishing palliative care through traits like compassion, psychic and emotional support, and counseling. Most importantly, nurses enhance patient care and satisfaction as listeners, motivators, advocates, and mediators. It means that the nurses perceive, devise, incorporate, familiarize, and lead result-oriented healthcare practices.
- Leading and integrating improvements
Present-day nurses are not just mere nurses. As the forefront fighters, nurses are conscious of the necessity to change and its significance for the entire healthcare system. Standing at the frontline, they are the first ones to notice and handle the gravity of emergencies. Nowadays, they not only have academic fundamentals and dynamic experience but scholarly capabilities. Hence, well-equipped nurses are capable of transforming medical practices and saving human lives.
It is how Elizabeth Mikula observed patients suffering from congenital heart conditions and explored innovative screening methods. Subsequently, her collaborative efforts led to the development of a non-invasive screening pulse oximetry-based testing. The testing measures oxygen saturation and heart rate in infants using a harmless sensor. The oxygen level enables medics to diagnose the probability of congenital heart defects in babies even before they show symptoms or fall sick.
As a result of the early diagnosis, the infant’s death rate drastically decreased to 33% in the United States. Currently, an improved version of the toolkit is saving many more lives across the globe. Thus nurses not only explore and embrace innovation but harvest its benefits for the refinement of healthcare practices. In the end, they are facilitating, empowering, and inspiring positive change in healthcare provision.
Conclusion
Though nursing professionals are crucial for the day-to-day operations of the healthcare system, their role expands beyond routine care. Nurses have endeavored to alleviate patient suffering and pain since primitive times. At present, nurses are motivating, initiating, and leading inventive approaches to prevent healthcare catastrophes. Their efforts are not only minimizing but defying devastating consequences from global emergencies.
Thus it is vital to acknowledge, facilitate and further polish their creative abilities. Otherwise, limiting and hindering their way to innovation can intensify healthcare challenges in the future.
