Concepts and Proposition of Nursing Intellectual Human Capital Middle-range Theory

Nursing
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Nursing
There were times when the vacancy rates for registered nurses (RNs) in hospitals were high, and they were easily filled, but those times are long gone since the current inadequate nurse staffing is different. A report that was commissioned by American Hospital Association in 2002, the inadequate staffing in nursing "reflects fundamental changes in population demographics, career expectations, work attitudes and worker dissatisfaction," (American Hospital Association, 2002). The situation is expected to continue for the next two decades with the demand for RNs growing by 40 percent. However, there was a slight increase in the number of RNs between the years 2001 and 2002 due to an increase in demand for nurses, increased salary and a weak economy. This was due to the return of RNs, who had retired and the influx of foreign-born RNs. However, the inadequate staffing is due to the aging of nurses, increasing unwillingness of people to consider the profession because of career choices that are available to them.
Currently, the situation is further complicated due to the "changes in hospital care such as new medical technologies and declining average length of stay, that have led to increasing of care required by patients while they are in the hospitals," (American Hospital Association, 2002). These technological changes in the medical care have seen less serious patients receive outpatient treatment rather than inpatient. Also, those patients who previously spent their recovery stages in hospital settings are currently discharged to receive outpatient attention. However, the consequences of these changes are that there are more sick people in the hospitals who need more care that the present nursing staff is not able to provide.
Nursing intellectual human capital middle-range theory is broad and holds many concepts that can easily be applied to the entire nursing profession. The theory conceptualizes the aspects of human capital as well as the structural capital in the nursing profession and how they influence the patient and organizational outcomes.
Middle-range Theory
The concepts of this theory are based on the assumption that the major role of nurses is to care for the patients thus caring is used as a nursing discipline. This is how the nurses interact with their patients as the primary expression of caring for them. However, caring is not limited time, physical or space limitations and this is used to reflect the humanity that is in us. Ten curative factors used to describe caring, and they tend to promote healing, wholeness, the growth of the patients and their families as well as health. However, due to the gaps in the nursing theories, the middle-range commonly referred to as the nursing intellectual capital theory was developed to address the gaps. It conceptualizes all the nursing knowledge in organizations and provides and explains all the mechanisms for the effects of the available knowledge on the outcomes of both patients and agencies.
Its concepts and propositions are not many, making it easy for it to be tested and measured in different contexts. It provides a framework that will be used to understand the contribution of nursing knowledge to hos...