The role of nurses has changed since the pandemic. Traditional methods were immediately retired, and more technologically driven strategies came into the picture. Since nurses were at the forefront of providing care to patients, they had to adjust to the shifting environment right away. As a nurse, you may have also immediately aligned yourself with the new healthcare trends. These include more online degrees, a step into telehealth, and encouraging greater patient autonomy.
Healthcare trends are here to stay since these new concepts have proven suitable for a growing and increasingly dynamic society. The healthcare industry has dedicated itself to optimal patient care. Nurses have always played a significant role in providing optimal medical intervention. Here is an exploration of how the nursing body such as yourself gets used to the new medical innovations without qualms.
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Choosing Online Degrees
Nurses need to stay educated to do their job. As a nurse, you also had to find opportunities to resume school and top up your current qualifications while you were working. Traditional nursing practice made it difficult to balance work and school, often sacrificing one for the other. Therefore, degrees started to enter the picture once the pandemic began to settle online. So, instead of choosing one over the other, you got to resume school and fast-track learning more efficiently.
Lucrative and engaging degrees like online master in nursing programs provide you with the tools, knowledge, and skills you need to be an expert nurse. Once you acquire a master’s, you branch out and embrace more senior positions at work. For any nurse, the idea of up-skilling in their field efficiently is enough to convince them to adopt online degrees as the new form of learning.
Focused On Self Care
The medical sector is notorious for being highly pressurized, with numerous cases to attend to and minimal breaks in between. Consequently, you may have pulled overtime and worked beyond the regular nine to five. In the past, this would have taken a toll on you, stressing you out and causing you to experience severe burnout. Lack of self-care also led to more medical errors, injured patients, and errors in manageable tasks.
You cannot provide optimal care to patients when your health takes a plunge for the worst, so self-care became a part of the healthcare trend. Hospitals played a significant role in ensuring nurses got adequate time for themselves. This involved hiring more nurses, delegating the workload in a balanced manner, and designing more flexible schedules. This allowed you to rest between patient checkups, have your meals on time and return to your family, eradicating self-isolation. You would also have the space to seek therapy.
While nurses are in the business of caring for others, they must take certain steps to protect themselves as well. Regardless of the state of practice, the practice setting, or their scope of practice, all nursing professionals should take measures to protect their professional licenses and income with malpractice insurance and disability insurance.
Many employers offer malpractice and disability insurance as part of their employee benefits package, but nurses should know that it can be better to seek out these policies on their own. This guide to physician’s disability insurance explains why nurses should purchase individual disability coverage rather than relying on the coverage provided by their employer.
Integrated Telemedicine
In 2020 more than 20% of medical visits in the US were being conducted virtually. The widespread adoption of telemedicine made it easier for you to streamline patient care and automate tasks. Telehealth is the process of distributing healthcare services through an electronic medium. It has allowed you to provide long-distance patient care, connect patients to relevant doctors, send reminders, resources for reading, and remote admissions.
This has changed healthcare and made it far more flexible. Telehealth and the telemedicine program also led to the implementation of online portals. These contained a patient’s test results, prescription refill requests, and even videos on the hospital-provided services.
Adapted To Holistic Care
Healthcare trends also impacted patients and made them much more autonomous about their health. As a result, patients sought care that extended beyond chemical intervention and focused on their overall well-being. Therefore, your position as a nurse made it possible to provide totalitarian care. This included consoling patients through difficult news, showing compassion, and encouraging patients to get therapy.
For instance, spending time with a patient with cancer by giving them company, discussing spiritually, and relaxing them before surgery. Holistic care has shown that patients flourish better when they get more attention that is not limited to medication and brief consultation.
Explored Diverse Employment Opportunities
Technology has also led to new nursing opportunities. You could contribute to the healthcare sector outside of traditional roles as a nurse advisor or a traveling nurse. As a nurse advisor, you could work remotely with the healthcare board to develop new policies, monitor immobile patients, and even provide information to the public health sector. This is particularly useful for research papers, designing emergency hotlines, and helping patients manage conditions like arthritis in an informed manner.
Similarly, as a traveling nurse, you could lend your expertise outside hospitals. You could travel to different states to work in hospitals retail clinics and enjoy a diverse working experience. This allowed the healthcare sector to retain a positive patient outcome.
Took Up More Specialization Roles
The healthcare sector has always faced a staff shortage, even more so during the pandemic. There are few doctors to balance the high patient turnover rate, which puts the healthcare industry under tremendous pressure. This encouraged the nurses to look into cardiac, pediatric, and emergency services specializations.
As a specialized nurse, you become more autonomous in working with patients in some states such as Maryland, allowing you to work without a physician’s supervision. Your new skillset allowed you to provide more hands-on care, design diagnostic routes, and administer medication.
Pushed Retirement For Later
The pandemic encouraged nurses to return from retirement and help out with patient care. This encouraged nurses to push retirement later and focus on continuing work. Most nurses continued keeping their job well into their sixties. With the nurse shortage, this helped in looking after patients better. As a nurse, no matter what age you occupy, you can now choose to keep your job. By 2030, more than 40% of nurses over the age of 50 and over 80 million nurses over the age of 65 will continue their profession.
The healthcare sector is continuously shifting to adjust to the dynamic population. Healthcare trends define patient care parameters and how nurses adapted to their new role helped improve patient outcomes. These trends also introduced online education, which has reshaped how you can earn higher qualifications. Your new role includes becoming more focused on self-care, getting used to telemedicine, providing holistic care, and seeking a specialization. This will allow you to explore new career opportunities, which will help you develop as a nurse.
