Nursing Case Study

Working as a part of multidisciplinary teams in the ICU, we often question ourselves what we do as nurses make our job so ‘special’ that differ from other team members. Providing personal cares and assisting the patient’s ADL can be done by RPNs or PSWs. Assessment, analysis of data, and implementation of the patient’s nutritional status, physical ability and strength, and social/legal issue can be dealt by dietitians, physiotherapists or occupational therapists, and social workers, respectively. Because being helpful, caring, or even friendliness come from most nurses’ nature, we don’t always intend to exhibit it consciously. What we do as a nurse may be merely no more than the execution of orders made by the other professions, and this realization

“The nurses are the face of an organization” is the phrase you hear during every organizational orientation, and in fact, Kimball and Montoya (2012) claimed nurses are the “one of the tools used in successful marketing campaigns (p. 188)” because most of times the nurses are the one who deliver the only product of hospital organization, named patient care. Although nursing may not have limited boundary and pinpoint focus of what we do like a specialty profession, such as a dietitian, nursing is not so invisible anymore. As a matter of fact, thank you to the predecessors’ works, we are already known to execute a wide range of care with professionalism and discipline (Gordon,

But have we established our status high enough to influence the organization and politics? Are we viewed by public as “powerful” and “respectful”? How could we make our patient say “what I need is a nurse, not a doctor”? The problem is that the nursing care automatically comes with a hospital stay without extra cost, and the most patients assume that all the nurses who work in the hospital are educated and trained especially in Canada (Calman, 2006; Driver & Wysong, 2009). Due to the historical hierarchical relationship between doctors and nurses, the majority of patients relies on the information comes from the doctors who spend time with them less than 5 minutes than nurses who teach them every tiny detail all day on-demand (McDonald & McIntyre, 2014). It takes, perhaps, a hospital experience without the existence of nurses for the patients and physicians to truly realize who is actually doing the work. Nursing unions should take back their right to initiate labor strike. Giving the patient a right to select his own nurse with cost would be another idea as Fawcett and Bourbonniere (2001) suggested. The patient would have to pay attention not only to the caring attitude of each nurse, but also to the degree of knowledge and skill each nurses possess if they have to pay for the care they