Nurses Face Challenges: Long Hours, Low Pay, and More - Research Paper

Introduction

Nursing is one of the popular occupations with a large population of the world, taking it as a career. Moreover, the profession is aimed at helping the people who are in need, and it saves lives (Reidun 34). However, working as a nurse is associated with the significant weaknesses related to challenges faced by the people working on this occupation.

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One of the weaknesses associated with the nursing occupation is long working hours. Most patients in hospitals require 24 hours attention, and nurses are obligated to do this (Aiken 16). Due to such needs, most nurses have to work during the night to care for patients in hospitals. Nurses find it challenging to balance their social life and work-life since they have to spend most hours at hospitals taking care of the patients. Redundancy of the job is the other challenge associated with the long hours in hospitals (Walter 7). The nurse jobs are to take care of sick people, and when one dies or is cured, the other patients come, and the process is repeated throughout the year. Having a redundant job and working for long hours makes any job less exciting and quickly tiresome (Hussain 24).

The other weakness of nursing as an occupation is Ethical dilemma while at the job place. Most ethical issues in patient care issues are the need to safeguard patient's rights, conversant on consent during treatment, and advanced care planning (Ulrich 12). Protecting the patient's right to privacy is also one of the ethical dilemmas associated with nurses (Alfandre 144). For example, the patient problem could emotionally affect the nurse, and nurses cannot share it with anyone, including the psychologist; hence, they suffer in silence. The other ethical dilemma is the need to establish the boundary between what one considers to be ok and what is deemed to be rightful by law ((Preshaw 12). A patient could in pain the most effective pain killer in the situation is opioids; hence the healthcare provider has to face the challenge. Nurse occupation is also associated with psychological trauma, especially to the nurses with high mortality of the patients (Li 7). Above fifty percent of the total US mortality in 2018 occurred in hospitals under the care of health providers (Hatfield 11). Every nurse with above six months of experience has seen at least one patient die while they are under their care. The study done to the British nurses showed that twenty percent of nurses get traumatic psychological challenges that influence their job in the workplace and outside the work (Zadeh 14).

Finally, the other major weakness associated with nursing as an occupation is the spread of contagious infection from patients to nurses. 17 to 57 US care workers per million die from occupational infectious diseases and injuries (Quinn 425). Common notoriously contiguous infections that are easily transferable from the patient to the healthcare provider include the Ebola virus, Tuberculosis, and the most recent coronavirus. A most recent case of coronavirus in china, many healthcare workers, have died trying to help the patients infected with the virus (Nishiura 7). Generally, caring for the patient needs precaution and high hygiene level.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the nursing occupation has significant weaknesses, some of which influence the nurse's health, and others could result in imprisonment. However, it has the satisfaction of saving people's lives. Therefore, people who wish to pursue their careers as healthcare providers should work on it since it is helpful.

Work Cited

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Aiken, Linda H., et al. "Hospital nurse staffing and patient mortality, nurse burnout, and job dissatisfaction." Jama 288.16 (2002): 1987-1993.

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Hatfield, K. M., Dantes, R. B., Baggs, J., Sapiano, M. R., Fiore, A. E., Jernigan, J. A., & Epstein, L. . "Assessing variability in hospital-level mortality among US medicare beneficiaries with hospitalizations for severe sepsis and septic shock." Critical care medicine 46.11 (2018): 1753.

Hussain, I., Shu, R., Tangirala, S., & Ekkirala, S. "The voice bystander effect: How information redundancy inhibits employee voice." Academy of Management Journal 62.3 (2019): 828-849.

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Ulrich, C. M., Taylor, C., Soeken, K., O'Donnell, P., Farrar, A., Danis, M., & Grady, C. "Everyday ethics: ethical issues and stress in nursing practice." Journal of advanced nursing 66.11 (2010): 2510-2519.

Zadeh, R. S., Shepley, M. M., Williams, G., & Chung, S. S. E. "The impact of windows and daylight on acute-care nurses' physiological, psychological, and behavioral health." HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal 7.4 (2014): 35-61.