Nursing Societal Influences

Societal Influences on Professional Nursing The nursing profession is an evolving field of work that shows no signs of stopping. With advancements in technology and education, the nursing profession must change in order to keep up with the rest of society. There are many changing societal factors that are influencing nursing as the year progress. As mentioned before, an increase of technology use is a major influence on nursing, the introduction of evidence-based practice in the professional field and in the educational environment plays a role in a nurse’s everyday life. Also, there are the changes in society itself that benefit the nursing profession. For example, the breaking of stereotypical gender roles in society results in male nurses

A nurse must be able to perform activities like moving a patient, lifting heavy equipment, being on their feet for much of their shift, etc. The nursing profession can be very taxing on a person’s body and society as a whole is seeing the effects of this. Older nurses who have been in the field for a long time are no longer able to perform these tasks and it is causing them to change their area of expertise, or even leave their profession entirely. This has negatively impacted effective health care delivery and proper patient-centered care because these nurses are not able to effectively help their patients. Research shows that there are a large amount of nurses that are near or at the retirement age. This could lead to a dramatic decrease in nurses and possibly a nurse shortage. However, even though there is a large amount of older nurses presently in the field, there are a growing number of young nurses. This creates an intergenerational team of young and old nurses that could be very beneficial to hospitals. The older nurses would be able to pass down their knowledge and tips to younger nurses, allowing them to obtain years of knowledge/experiences just by learning from the older nurses. Also with changing stereotypes of gender roles, more males have entered the nursing field, increasing the amount of nurses. Although this may be a positive, there

Savor reviewed research that interviewed nurses and explained how many nurses “pointed out that the demand for nurses is rising, with only slow increases in supply, and that nurses’ earnings flattened” (2017). This can lead to a shortage of nurses because in current day society, living has become much more expensive. For example the cost of housing has increased dramatically, and students who go to college are now in charge of paying back their tremendous amounts of student’s loans. All these expenses add up and can be discouraging to a student trying to enter the nursing field because starting pay of a nurse is not enough to live comfortably in current day society. Governments are beginning to realize this and are seeing the decrease of nurses entering the field. New incentives have been created by come state governments to encourage more nurses to enter the field. One example of this is New York state government has created a Nursing Loan Forgiveness program that allows newly graduated nurses loans to be lowered, or paid off completely if they meet the requirements set by New York State. These requirements include being a resident and worker in New York State as a clinical instructor or a nursing school faculty member (NYS). This was created to encourage people to further their education and even become nursing school faculty