Essay on Public Health Capacity: Challenges and the Need for Competency-Based Guidelines

Introduction

Generally, as far as the professional establishment in regards to public health is a concern, stakeholders need competence-based guidelines to advance their capacity to handle sophisticated and also changing needs for crucial services. Consequently, given the fact that the sophistication of the problems encountered by public health officials has increased, scholars have opined that inadequate resources have been deployed to the preparation of the workforce as well as its leaders (Denker et al., 2015). Recent reports concerning Health Resources and also Services Administration to the Head of State and Congress regarding the status of the health workforce in the US have demonstrated trends affecting the healthcare of the country, including advanced needs for competent public health personnel and effectively-educated leadership. According to the Institute of Medicine report, The Future of Public Health demands that a sustained personnel capacity establishment should be put in place to accommodate the needs of emerging public health challenges and also an evolving public health system (Denker et al., 2015). Ideally, the primary purpose of this piece of work is to formulate a political competency development plan for a nursing environment.

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Nursing Expertise

Medics define clinical expertise as a hybrid of practical and also theoretical knowledge. Indeed, clinically expert nursing officials are distinguished from other professionals by their frequent intuitive capacity to effectively formulate crucial clinical decisions while at the same time comprehending the entire nature of the situation at hand. Therefore, expertise influences nurses' clinical judgment and also the quality of care and establishes the time a clinician tests and also refines both theoretical and practical intelligence in actual nursing situations. It is also important to note that there is a detailed nursing expertise acquisition, which entails five possible expertise levels. These include novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and also expert. At the novice level, clinicians are still in training school while those at the advanced beginner level apply learned procedures and also rules to establish what actions are needed that will be essential in the immediate situation. Consequently, competent clinicians are task-oriented and also deliberately arrange their duties in terms of plans to achieve their objectives. Competent clinicians have the ability to respond to various clinical situations, although they lack the capacity to determine circumstances in terms of an overall picture.

Proficient clinicians, on the other hand, have the ability to perceive situations entirely and have the capacity to recognize and also respond to ever-changing circumstances. Experts opine that clinicians who fall in this capacity are well experienced and almost ready to operate as an expert nurse. The last category who are expert nurses have the capacity to recognize unexpected clinical responses and also have the ability to alert others as far as potential problems are concern before they happen. Ideally, a nurse in this level is fully advanced in that they have an intuitive expertise of the entire situation and have the capacity to diagnose effectively and also respond without wasteful considerations concerning ineffective possibilities. Due to their superior abilities, clinicians in this level are frequently consulted by other clinicians and depended upon to be preceptors. Interestingly, medical human resource professionals argue that despite the fact that most of the nurses progress to the competent stage of expertise, not many reach the expert level. In a nutshell, when developing a political competency development plan, it is essential that all the stages are factored to serve all the segments of nursing professional holistically. When the program is holistic, it serves the interest of the clinicians at the workplace, thus improving service delivery.

Health Policy Advocacy

Essentially, it is essential to note that health policy advocacy is a critical ingredient that every political competency plan should have, as stated by the American Nurses Association. According to the association, health policy advocacy should serve nurses' interests and their patients in the workplace together with their communities. However, it should be understood that legislative and also political advocacy is no less essential to advancing the nursing field and client care. Despite the above, health policy advocacy makes the stakeholders in the nursing field very conscious in regards to best nursing practices (Sade & Peres, 2015). Best practices consciousness is wanting since nurses, and their patients experience tuff situations in their line of duty. For instance, they work for long hours at inappropriate times, something that will make them frustrated, thus affecting service delivery. In consideration of such cases, the healthy advocacy will make relevant authorities revamp healthcare policies, hence refining the sector.

On the other hand, the health policy advocacy will benefit patients specifically in terms of quality care and health expenses. The health policy advocacy will bring a sense of satisfaction to clinicians at their workplaces, which in turn will provide quality care to the patients. Further, the strategy will reform the aspect of hospital expenses transparency, which will make patients know what they are required to pay for healthcare services in advance, thus making them ready to cater to their bills (Sade & Peres, 2015). Therefore, a political competency development plan is essential for a nursing workplace since it is service delivery oriented.

Self-reflection on the Strength & Strategy Plan

It is no longer enough for me to consolidate training in the mere transmission of a body of knowledge. There is a need for me to organize curricula in the sense of professionalization that responds to the emerging demands of the social work environment (Siren, & Gehrs, 2018). Also cited by reinforces this need by defining the current context of nursing education as one that develops in an environment of great dynamism and enormous challenges. I must face the speed of changes, the explosive development of knowledge, conflicts of social and cultural values, the impact of technology, and the diversification of professional specialties (Head et al 2018). My question is: "what should I be able to do at the end of the course?" or, in other words, "what is my competence at the beginning of your professional life?" This assertion places me as a nurse in the presence of knowing how to act professionally, not confined to knowing how to do because it is assumed to be interdependent with significant acts, attitudes, and emotions by and for the subjects and their contexts (Head et al 2018).

The pyramid is useful to me as it shows the relationship between educational programs and professional performance. It is a simplified model on four levels: In the first, the basis of the pyramid, me as a student has to know facts; at the second level, I have to understand how to apply the facts, knowledge is not only recoverable but also applicable to new problems (Head et al 2018). These first levels are at the level of cognition that includes instruction, factual, and concepts. At the third and fourth levels, I have to acquire skills and be of professional behavior. At the third level, I have to learn what to do in controlled situations and in vitro, demonstrating the desired competence (Siren, & Gehrs, 2018). At the fourth level, I have to perform the tasks in reality. Having reached the top of the pyramid, I will consider that I have attained the initial level of professional performance. From the document consulted, the figure of the Miller pyramid was adapted, which is shown below, to illustrate this path described in the direction of professionalization.

Competency Development Plan

The professionalization of nursing care, the specificity of knowledge, and the issue of discipline or science are issues that have remained over time. Multi-professionalism in the complexity of responses to health problems, in life processes, and the indispensability of nursing care support the professional practices of nurses (Head et al 2018). Nurses know that interdisciplinary in a health team excludes neither the independence and autonomy of each professional nor a specific referential1 that needs a particular contribution in the vast domain of health. However, issues such as nursing as a discipline and profession continue to arise (Head et al 2018). Despite what has been written over the years, it continues to justify concern about both because nursing, as a profession with certified training, has a very recent history, beginning only in the century.

The competence development plan aims to categorize professional nurses according to specific clinical competencies. Assess nurses' knowledge levels regarding the PDCCE (Plan for the Development of Clinical Competencies for Nurses). Add values to professionals according to their functional profile and competence (Siren, & Gehrs, 2018). The collection of quantitative data is carried out by obtaining structured responses, deductive analysis techniques, and guided results. A structured interview will be used as a data collection instrument with five questions directed to the subject under study, and the collected data will be analyzed and tabulated through descriptive analysis (Head et al 2018). This plan provides a holistic view of healthcare practice by health professionals, since, through the clinical skills of nurses, they can manage a functional group of a health institution with quality care.

The countless strategies used for professional revaluation are sometimes faced with related obstacles, on the one hand, due to the impossibility of abandoning medical prescriptions and, on the other, due to the absence of a body of more complex and autonomous tasks (Siren, & Gehrs, 2018). The question raised concerning nursing as a discipline has been blurred, both by the nature of care, or the scientific evidence of the investigations (Head et al 2018). On the other hand, the complexity of the object under study - the person, as a human being, has been a factor in professional development because it is both subject and purpose of the intervention itself, with the same characteristics, vicissitudes, fragilities, and complementarities.

Conclusion

There is a perspective of broad knowledge in nursing, including scientific, professional, ethical, and relational, that is projected in situations of well-being for the subject and is translated in the context of care provision. This is evident by the way the nurse-client interaction takes place and for the adequate, personalized, and subjective response to each health-disease situation. However, by analysis, sharing and dissemination are not always verified as nursing is one of the most representative sectors of health. Nursing does not exclude the position of inferiority in terms of status, organizational power, and, consequently, political, compared to the dominant profession of doctors. This fact is associated with a still limited space as a political interlocutor, which determines social visibility that is not always recognized, associated with some scarcity of scientific research centered on nursing itself.

References

Denker, A. L., Sherman, R. O., Hutton-Woodland, M., Brunell, M. L., & Medina, P. (2015). Florida nurse leader survey findings: Key leadership competencies, barriers to leadership, and succession planning needs. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(7/8), 404-410.

Head, B. A., Song, M. K., Wiencek, C., Nevidjon, B., Fraser, D., & Mazanec, P. (2018). Palliative nursing summit: nurses leading ch...