Roles of Advanced Practice Registered Nurses

Professional Role Paper
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Abstract
Medical experts and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) perform clinical activities while caring for patient populations from various ethnic backgrounds. The team of nurses also includes professionals who are essential to determining the direction of healthcare, such as anesthetists, midwives, and nurse specialists. APNs are leading the way in providing care to the public today by diagnosing, evaluating, treating, and counseling on complex medical conditions. Professionals engage in continuing education to gain skills that put them ahead of evolving technology, techniques, and other clinical innovations in order to address the different requirements of patients and families. The association of nurses has long supported healthcare reforms that would ensure everyone's access to high-quality care at an affordable price. Starting these improvements came with big obligations for nurses, like incorporating evidence-based practices. APRNs and APNs are needed in various job roles, such as disease diagnosis, laboratory tests, patient care and management, as well as the formulation of a long term recovery plan for these patients. Of essence here is the broad scope of duties that APRNs cover within a healthcare facility setup. Their crucial role in these facilities is further amplified by the need for them to always be as professional as possible when it comes to the provision of the highest quality of services altogether.
Keywords: Patients, nurses, APRNs, healthcare
Introduction
As the name suggests, an APRN is usually a nursing professional who has gone through it all and has garnered all the professional and ethics experience needed. There is indeed a lot that goes behind the scenes for APRNs to deliver the best quality services to patients. They are well trained to purposefully accord the specific needs that each patient has in their respective situations. APRNs therefore come with some level of resourcefulness that is quite crucial in the bigger picture. This paper works to break down the specific needs and functions of the APRN, detailing their respective duties in the medical field.
Overview and Qualifications
According to Urbanowicz (2019) an APRN nurse is one who has the expertise to properly and adequately handle various situations within the healthcare setup, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the service delivery to the patients. They serve under all capacities from primary care to acute care, from the general ward to specialized ones that deal with specific illnesses. They are also there in gerontology, child and adult care, family and mental health, neonatal as well as women health. APRNs are simply nurses who have undertaken postgraduate training in nursing and therefore achieved polishing of their skills to suit the demands of the healthcare industry. They are usually the primary caregivers, and focus more on the provision of preventative medical care to the society (Gazza, 2019). When it comes to education, a master’s degree is usually preferred and the basic requirement for a practice in APRN.
On the terminal end, a doctoral degree is preferable. The certification for an APRN is usually quite thorough and covers various aspects of the nursing experience to ascertain that only the most qualified individuals are accorded the certification. In nursing, there is no benefit of doubt given during the certification process, since these are individuals who will deal directly with matters of life and death. Leaving anything to doubt would therefore be tantamount to planting time bomb right underneath a hospital. This is because, in addition to the management of acute or chronic conditions, APRNs are also usually in charge of diagnosis of the same. One therefore needs to be in perfect knowledge of what he or she is diagnosing to prevent cases of misdiagnosis that might in turn lead to so many lawsuits and trips to court.
APRN and the Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the brainchild of former president Obama. It was passed in order to lower the cost of healthcare, improve the quality of healthcare delivered, and the ultimate equitability and fairness when it came to healthcare delivery. The ACA also worked to increase the coverage of medical insurance to a larger population while also promoting health through prevention of diseases that can be prevented. As it can be seen, the APRNs are right in the middle of everything that would define the success of the ACA (Brassard, 2015). It is through them that promotion of health and prevention of diseases can be a reality.
The ACA stipulates that healthcare facilities embrace an electronic database that will be used to store all the patient records. This requirement essentially aims at improving the process of documentation in order to make it more efficient and less time-consuming. Looking at the bigger picture, this will grant APRNs less time to deal with paperwork and hence more time with the patients. According to Brassard (2015), this will result in better patient outcomes since they will learn and understand the needs of the patients first hand. The planned expanded coverage of healthcare under the ACA will also mean that more APRNs will be needed on board so as to handle the imminent increase in the number of patients that would be handled. Hoyt and Proehl (2015) note that an additional 8000 to 9000 new APRNs will be needed to fill the gap created by the expansion. The target is to ensure that patients do not encounter any delays when they come to seek medication, and that they can be treated in a timely, more personalized manner.
When it comes to the provision of equitable and affordable healthcare, the ACA clearly states that there will be more restriction on insurers who usually tend to put certain limits on the amount that the patients can spend on treatment. The patients will also be provided with the ability to file for denied claims while also having the power to decide on which provider they would like for themselves. This therefore, means that APRNs are immersed into the mix, as they will be there to give the quality healthcare that these citizens so badly need from their healthcare providers. The opportunities for APRNs will therefore be expanded. Those who provide high quality healthcare services are given the opportunity for reward, as long as there is evidence of the same.
This gives the APRNs a new challenge and additional tasks. They are supposed to come up with more clinics that are managed by nurses, throw more support towards student programs and take a more active role in the education of patients about the benefits of the ACA. Hoyt and Proehl (2015) further note that the ACA has approved new clinics that are to be managed by nurses, for the purposes of further educating APRNs for the disadvantaged communities. This approval also extends to the renova...