Affordable Care Act and Patient Advocacy Essay Example

The affordable care act (ACA) was signed into law on March 23 2010. However, the implementation of ACA was done in January 2014. The implementation of the affordable care act led to increased coverage of uninsured citizens, enhanced access to better healthcare, and improved delivery models. The affordable care act led to a more organized care system and extended access to social based long-term care. The government aided financing for eligible Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. Many states are continuing to create new health insurance markets where people will access proper health insurance plans. States are putting up appropriate legislative and social structures to ensure citizens have access to affordable and quality health care. However, most of the measures have majorly addressed the issue of health coverage. A large number of citizens still lack quality care. Patients lack the required information about their rights and the quality of care they receive from health facilities. As such, patient safety, patient advocacy, and the expected changes will be discussed highlighting their impacts on the nursing profession.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The existing healthcare practice is overly complex, risky, and susceptible to error. Medical errors and subsequent actions are the leading causes of deaths and injury even though appropriate error preventive measures have been put in place in most healthcare facilities. There is a need for health care providers to focus more on eradicating errors in the course of treatments. Safety practices can be enhanced in healthcare by avoiding medical errors and preventing patient falls (Dandoy, Hilden, Billett, & Mueller, 2017). For instance, nurses should ensure that appropriate medication is provided to patients. Moreover, the proper dosage of medications should be given a priority. Nurses have a responsibility to double check the treatments offered to patients to prevent prospective errors.

Nurses can contribute to safe practice in healthcare through following up the standard operating procedures. Different treatments have distinct standard procedures that need to be followed. For instance, a patient with an injury would is supposed to have bedrest of particular days in the hospital. Such a standard needs to be followed to ensure complete healing and proper administration of healthcare. Standard procedures reduce the risk of adverse conditions of patients during the administration of care (Dandoy et al., 2017). The process of providing effective healthcare is linear and needs firm adherence. An infringement or failure to comply with a set operation procedure will not lead to the desired outcomes. In most cases, faulty follow ups of medical procedures resonate to patient's mortality. As such, it is critical for nurses to ensure that all standard procedures are followed to provide expected health care outcomes.

Effective communication is a significant component of safe practices in healthcare. Communication plays an invaluable role in ensuring integration and coordination of the complex healthcare activities. Healthcare work involves many health professionals that directly or indirectly contribute to the administration of effective treatment to patients (Dandoy et al., 2017). All the stakeholders in the healthcare chain must work collaboratively to ensure that patients get the right disease diagnosis and treatments. A miscommunication from any stakeholder may lead to the administration of incorrect treatment leading to adverse conditions of a patient. The nurse is at the center of the communication chain in healthcare. Therefore, nurses need to ensure that they have appropriate communication skills to coordinate all the activities under their jurisdiction in healthcare.

Safety begins with proper guidance and leadership. In healthcare, there are various nursing cadres. These classifications of nursing start require real leadership to steer them to work and deliver quality care effective leadership in a top priority to any successful nurse (Dandoy et al., 2017). The nurse leader should understand all the operations and descriptions of all nurses that he/she leads. Nursing work involves conducting risky procedures that extend beyond ordinary working hours. As a leader, there is a need to put up concrete structures that will look into the affairs of nurses to motivate them in their endeavors to provide the best healthcare. The different teams need to be motivated and engaged in the design and implementation of policies that touch on their welfare.

Patients make up the largest partners in healthcare. Patient's needs should be the key priority when administering care. Nurses need to practice patient-centered care to ensure safety in healthcare. Nurses should provide not only clinical care to the patients but also emotional, psychological, social, and financial support (Davoodvand, Abbaszadeh, & Ahmadi, 2017). Nurses need to facilitate and encourage patient's family participation in the entire process of care provision. Patients will feel safer receiving care from a nurse who provides holistic care. The trust and sobriety developed towards a nurse further creates a better working environment and contributes significantly to the provision of quality care.

Dialysis nurse offer care to patients with kidney problems. A dialysis nurse works closely with nephrologists to ensure the patients' blood is cleansed. During treatment, the treatment a patient may develop other problems, for instance, high blood pressure. It is the work of a dialysis nurse to treat such subsidiary diseases that arise during kidney treatment. Dialysis nurses educate the patient about how the entire treatment process will be conducted, explaining how much time it will take, and answering any questions that may arise from the patient (Levy, Brown, & Lawrence, 2016). Moreover, the dialysis nurse offers encouragement to the patient during the entire treatment period.

For nurses, the most important part of their work is the provision of quality healthcare. However, nursing advocacy is an important aspect that leads to quality healthcare. Advocacy can help patients make informed decisions about the quality of care they receive. A nurse can help patients understand the healthcare process and available options within the healthcare facility. This can assist the patient in making an appropriate choice to receive the best treatment. A nurse can advocate for patient's rights through attending meetings and seminars aimed at developing treatment policies. While in these meetings the nurse can speak in the perspective of a patient. This can help in the creation of proper policies that are patient-centered. A nurse can advocate for patients by protecting them from illegal and unethical acts (Davoodvand et al., 2017) For instance, raising alarm on an immoral practice that has the prospect of being done on the patient's body.

Moreover, a nurse can advocate for a patient through defending patients' rights. Patients have their fundamental rights of receiving affordable treatment free from exploitation. An advocate nurse can come in to assist patients whenever their rights to access affordable care is flouted.

Healthcare sector has been revolutionalised since the implementation of the affordable care act. This state legislation aimed at providing affordable care to all people prioritizing on quality rather than the volume of the care. Various structures have been set out to ensure the success of the affordable care act. Insurance companies have been revived in several states to provide coverage to many people under different plans. Some policies have been laid out and if implemented the health care sector will achieve a milestone. Based on the changes in the administration of legislation in healthcare, nursing leadership roles are prospected to change. For instance, nurse's leaders will be required to spend most of their time coordinating the integrated processes in the nursing sector. Nurse leaders will also be involved in reconceptualizing the work of nurses in the context of culture, current, and future technologies.

The role of nurse leaders may change in the future due to policy changes. In future, nurse leaders will have more resources spent on expanding the nursing facilities (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017). It is likely that healthcare will expand and have wide coverage in the United States. As such, the existing care facilities will be insufficient. Thus, nursing leaders will be focused on ways to have more facilities where people can access healthcare.

Moreover, in future nurse leaders will be working on ways to broaden the nursing curriculum so that it can offer multisector knowledge to professionals in the healthcare industry. For instance, due to technology and policies related to technological changes, healthcare services will be more automated than currently. As such, the leader nurses will be working on designing an education system that blends effectively with technology.

The nursing profession will be transformed in future. The affordable care act will place many demands on health care professionals and provide them with many opportunities to design a patient-centered system. Currently, the affordable care act has started the long process of shifting the focus of U.S health care system from acute and specialty care. The necessity to move focus on patient-centered approached has been motivated by primary care, chronic conditions, transition care, and prevention of acute diseases such as hospital-acquired infections (Salmond & Chavarria, 2017). Due to the increase in the number of ageing people palliative care will continue to increase in the future.

Moreover, the population of insured people is increasing every day. The ethnic minority and people of the race who have faced obstacles in accessing quality healthcare will have access to a social economically diverse healthcare system. Therefore nurses will be preoccupied in addressing the problems from diverse populations.

Scientific and technological advancements are changing many facets of life. These technological changed to affect the dialysis nurse profession both positively and negatively. For instance, in the past dialysis used improvised equipment and rudimentary membranes. However, today the dialysis process involves the use of sophisticated medical equipment that ensures effective diagnosis and correct treatments to patients. In future technology may be so advanced that programmed Nano filters will traverse in the body cleansing all the metabolic waste from a kidney failure patient (Levy et al., 2016). As such, the work of a dialysis nurse in kidney care will be limited. Future innovations may lead to minimal demand in dialysis nurse.

The future for dialysis nurse is changing rapidly. In the past dialysis nurse's job was to learn how to operate the dialysis machines and the capacity to help the patient during therapy sessions. Currently, dialysis machines can provide patient information and can offer care to patients. Much analysis is done by the machines, and the nurse is only involved in a few clinical procedures. If these advancements in technology continue improving, the nurse's work will be reduced probably to the operation of the dialysis machine. Most of the analysis work will be done by the dialysis machines. This will resonate to minimal demand of dialysis nurses.

Conclusion

Patient quality is a key element in the provision of quality health care. Nurses play a critical role in ensuring patients receive care that is based on safety practices. A nurse can contribute to the provision of quality care through avoiding mistakes, following up the correct standards in medical procedures, developing an effective communication system, encouraging teamwork and practicing patient-centered care. A d...