What are we offered today by the aggressive new breed of leaders and educators in nursing? An angry, dwindling profession, failing with increasing frequency to meet the needs of patients and physicians and in the process making themselves and everyone else miserable. The idealistic young people who come into the profession to actually nurse patients are sometimes made to feel like Aunt Jemiinas, become discouraged and leave, or, if they remain, are denied status, promotions and raises.
The "new model" nursing leaders and educators pursue higher status, higher incomes, more respect and recognition—as indeed most of us do. There's nothing wrong with that. What is damaging is the mode of attack.
By striving to capture some independent middle ground between classical nursing and medical practice, nursing leaders threaten to make of their professionals neither nurses nor physicians, fit only to cause trouble: trouble for people who really want to nurse, trouble for physicians and administrators who can't get the help they need and, most of all, trouble for patients, who often cannot get timely medicines and competent ministrations without hiring a private-duty nurse. And even then competence is far from assured.
Many nursing leaders and educators seem intent on abandoning a badly needed profession in the search for a new category of health-care professional that no one has asked for and hardly anyone needs. They have not merely neglected and downgraded classical, basic nursing; they have also sought to restrict entry into the profession by raising the standards of accreditation of schools of nursing and of licensure of individuals in many instances beyond what is necessary for the basic skills that are in such short supply.
The Nursing Presence in General Practice: Revealing Dimensions of Day-to-day Experience of Practice Nurses in New Zealand
