The Importance Of Nursing Autonomy In Nursing

The Importance of Nursing Autonomy What is autonomy? Why does it matter? Why is important in your career? These are all the questions one may have while sitting in your last class of the day listening to your nursing professors emphasize the importance of “Autonomy” as a nurse. Why should we care though; why does autonomy matter to us as future nurses? To answer these questions, one must first understand exactly what autonomy means. To the general public autonomy is defined as, “freedom from external control or influence; independence” (Stammers, 2015, p. 160). To a nurse though, autonomy is defined as, “having the authority to make decisions and the freedom to act in accordance with one 's professional knowledge base” (Bularzik et al, 2013,

For the purpose of this paper the profession compared to nursing will be social work. Social work and nursing have many commonalities in autonomy. Social workers they must advocate for clients, which requires a lot of autonomy to make decisions and implement a plan for the best outcomes for their clients. This is similar to nursing autonomy because, like social workers, patient advocacy is very important and is a large part of what a nurse must do to ensure good outcomes for their patients. Advocacy for patients requires the social worker or the nurse a level of independence in order for them to voice concerns and opinions about their clients or patients (Jotkowitz et al, 2008, p. 15-20). As you can see, other professions, such as social work, also need autonomy in their career to be able to perform the job to the best of their abilities and this is the same in nursing (Evans, 2013, p.

One of the most common barriers to nursing practice is the fear of reprimand by hospital management. Even though patient advocacy and quality care are key aspects within the scope of nursing practice, nurses often report that they fear being reprimanded by the managers or physicians for saying or doing something even if it was in the patient’s best interest. Also, time is a key barrier for nurses to make autonomous decisions. Due to lack of resources and under staffing nurses often feel rushed from patient to patient and this leaves little time for nurses to make proper and well informed autonomous decisions. Another, important and probably most well known barrier to autonomy is the power dynamics seen between nurses and physicians. While the physician does have authority about patient care, so does the nurse, and many nurses fear confrontation when trying to make decisions about patient care because of many unclear dynamics seen between this interdisciplinary collaboration. These barriers all impede nurses from utilizing their full scope of practice and from providing better quality patient care. (Kaplan et al, 2006, p.