Role of a nurse Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Role of a nurse - Assignment Example Nursing is the promotion, protection and optimisation of health, alleviation of suffering and prevention of injury and illness through treatment and diagnosis (Basford and Slevin, 2003:4). It also entails advocacy in the care of populations, communities, families and people. There are numerous roles of a nurse depending on the setting. Nurses perform physical examinations on patients and study their medical histories. They provide health promotion, education and counselling in the various sectors that they work in. They offer a number of personalised interventions including wound care and administering of medications. They interpret information about their patients, make important decisions and take action. They supervise care that is given by other health care practitioners (Basford and Slevin, 2003:35). They work in collaboration with other healthcare practitioners to promote health for their patients. Finally, they conduct research on ways to improve patient outcomes. Working in teams in the nursing sector is beneficial to both patients and staff. In addition to helping patients, teamwork promotes employee satisfaction, cooperation and retention rates. When taking into account the team nursing framework, the following benefits can be considered. To start with, team members help one another readily, if a nurse has been assigned two patients and the other is free, they will definitely step in and help out. Secondly, this model leads to an increase in employee satisfaction (Denny and Earle, 2005:45). Previous case studies have shown that the scores of employee satisfaction increased with the adoption of the model. Finally, mentoring opportunities increase as novices are paired up with novices who guide them in performing their duties. This has been observed to increase the rates of employees’ retention. On the other hand, supervision has