Potential Role of Nurses in Advancing Health

Potential Role of Nurses in Advancing Health
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Potential Role of Nurses in Advancing Health
“The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Increasing the Focus of Nursing and Health Care on Equity and Discrimination” focuses on the heightened systemic discrimination and racism based on socioeconomic class, gender, and ethnicity. In addition, it emphasizes how the nursing profession can be significantly involved to address these systemic problems. The paper focuses on how Jack Needleman’s report influenced the nursing practice.
The 2021 report of the National Academy of Medicine makes recommendations to improve health equity. The three primary factors that contribute to systemic discrimination and racism are gender, class, and ethnicity. In that light, eliminating these problems entails promoting the accessibility of health services. The primary recommendation for improving health equity is tapping caregivers’ experience and expertise so that they can be fully engaged in helping all patients, particularly those with chronic health conditions (Needleman, 2021). For instance, nurses can be encouraged to work with different communities so that they can help to create healthy work and living environments. That way, it can be easier to minimize health problems that affect individuals in a specific region or community, which might be caused by poor lifestyles. Another crucial recommendation to improve health equity targets licensing boards, nursing education programs, and organizations to initiate systems, evidence-based interventions, and structures to foster nurses’ well-being and health. Notably, health equity is significant in this report since it is the only way to ensure that all people regardless of their socioeconomic classes, gender, and ethnicity have access to quality healthcare services. However, healthy equity cannot be achieved if caregivers are not involved since they are the primary stakeholders who interact with patients to ensure that they get proper medical services.
The social determinants of health (SDOH) refer to the conditions that individuals are born in, live, work, grow, and stay in throughout their lives. Indeed, they significantly influence the health of individuals directly and indirectly. Some examples of SDOH include socioeconomic status, physical environment, education, and employment. SDOH are the things that the report asserts lead to systemic discrimination and racism associated with health inequities. Specifically, one of the determinants that will be focused on to show how they influence health equity is employment. Employment refers to the state of working where people are paid. In that light, it makes individuals be subdivided into three primary groups, including high, middle, and low-income earners. The high-income earners get enough money to cater to their basic needs. On that note, they can afford proper housing, food, and clothing (Gottlieb et al., 2019). In contrast, low-income earners encounter problems to meet their daily necessities. For example, they face food insecurity, improper housing, and a lack of health insurance. As such, these people are unlikely to ...