Health Care Laws and their Implication on Nursing Responsibilities

Nursing
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NURSING
Health Care Laws and their Implication on Nursing Responsibilities
With the enactment of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the U.S healthcare took a tremendous trajectory marked with an increased need for more quality, accessible, and affordable healthcare services. The Affordable care Act made it possible for citizens to access patient-centered care. The transformed healthcare system demanded changes in professional dynamics.
The affordable care act created new and seamless opportunities for nurses to grow. These opportunities emerged as a result of new healthcare structures and programs that were elicited by the act.
With the Affordable Care Act, nurses have the opportunity to play a role in ensuring that clients are in a position to access care that is affordable, available, quality safe, and patient-centered. However, the nursing profession appeared constricted by out-dated policies, cultural barriers, and regulations, which limit the full potential of nurses based on training and education. Despite these limitations, the nursing profession has been empowered by expanding the scope of practice, especially for advanced practice registered nurses. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 was one of the remarkable legislation that expanded the realm of healthcare practice by not only focusing on acute and specialty care but it also enhanced aggressive efforts towards wellness, preventive care, transition care, palliative services, and primary health.
Under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, there was an overarching provision for affordable and accessible health services. It is upon this enactment that may call for more engagements with nurses in the provision of such care, keeping in mind the nurses constitute the single largest portion of healthcare resource.one of the critical recommendation that has been fronted by many stakeholders entail the broadening of nurses’ scope of practice, with a view of tapping the unexploited nursing potential that is gained from education and training. The health provides a base in primary care that can be widened if policy changes are made by implementing physician assistant and nurse practitioners legislations, as seen in the case of Washington and Arizona. This policy change can result in a net saving of at least $729 million over ten years' time (Hooker & Muchow, 2015). Primary care is a crucial predictor of equity and effectiveness. The physical assistance and nurse practitioners may not manage complex illness as physicians, but they show similarities in the context of patient encounters. Increasing physician assistants and nurse practitioners would increase access to primary care and limit the overutilization of more expensive emergency services (Hooker & Muchow, 2015).
The provision of quality healthcare services is an issue of great concern. Instances of low nurse-patient ratio have contributed significantly to low-quality services as nurse shortage hit most states in the U.S. In response to shortages, several states have enacted laws in a bid to ensure that hospitals or health facilities adopt appropriate nurse-patient ratios according to requirements of each unit. The need to adopt favorable ratios by ...