I appreciate having each and every one of you here with us today. I am also thrilled to have the chance to extend a warm welcome to both long-time members of the community and those who are new. Moreover, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to my speech. Today, I want to focus on one of the most important aspects of a nurse practitioner’s work, which is addressing the needs of patients. COVID-19 has especially pushed us and other medical personnel to address the needs of the patients. However, even prior to the pandemic, patients were burdened with a plethora of issues that the existing healthcare system in the United States has, subjecting them to inequality, poor care practices, and a lack of a patient-centered approach. In this speech, I want to discuss the most pressing issues that nurse practitioners should pay attention to meet the needs of their patients.
Nurse practitioners are generally overburdened with work and the need to take care of a large number of patients. Even before the pandemic, healthcare personnel had a high prevalence of anxiety, depression, acute stress reaction, burnout, and PTSD, which are combined with disturbances to daily life away from work. According to Wu et al. (2020), top executives at Johns Hopkins Medicine stressed how crucial it was to keep the resilience and well-being of its vital employees. Institutions must immediately establish the means by which nurse practitioners can increase their services in view of any additional crises that will unavoidably arise in the future. In this environment, it is very difficult to focus on what is most important, which is taking care of our patients’ needs, not only physical but also emotional and spiritual.
The first and foremost need of our patients is to have equality in the access and quality of services their healthcare providers give them. When everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue optimal health, health equity is accomplished (National Academies of Sciences et al., 2021). By comprehending and identifying the many variables that affect how well and how long people live, nurse practitioners can contribute to the development of community and individual-targeted solutions, as well as facilitate and work with interdisciplinary and multisector teams and partners to put those solutions into action. By taking on new responsibilities, working in unfamiliar environments, and significantly increasing their efforts to collaborate with communities and other sectors, nurse practitioners will have the ability to transform the landscape of health equity over the coming ten years.
Nurse practitioners encounter difficult needs at rates that are comparable to or higher than those of their medical colleagues. Despite this, they continue to provide the best possible patient care in hospitals. Within the golden standards for nurse practitioners, one of the key aspects is advocacy. The emphasis on this concept should be increased to meet the needs of any patient encountered. As advocates, we can use our voices to reach out to policymakers and executives to ensure that the needs of people in the healthcare field are addressed. Additionally, in order to support nurses’ new and expanded tasks, NP schools have to adapt their curricula, programs, and outlooks.
In summary, healthcare practitioners have been under a great deal of stress as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Particularly overworked and required to care for a greater number of patients were nurse practitioners. Even before the pandemic, we had significant rates of anxiety, despair, burnout, and PTSD even before the pandemic. Despite this, we pushed the efforts to provide the best possible healthcare The United States must distribute resources, concentrate on problems that affect people’s health, and step up efforts to build nursing capacity if it is to advance in achieving health equity. Thank you for your attention.
References
National Academies of Sciences, Flaubert, J., Menestrel, S., Williams, D., & Wakefield, M. (2021). The role of nurses in improving health equity. National Academies Press (US). Web.
Wu, A. W., Connors, C. A., & Norvell, M. (2021). Adapting RISE: Meeting the needs of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Review of Psychiatry (Abingdon, England), 33(8), 711–717. Web.