The Varying Function of Nurses

In health-care field, duties are scheduled in shifting time. To help fight a shortage of above 11,000 registered nurses across Canada, the roles played by health workforce in the delivery of care are now varying. According to the report of Canadian Nurses Association, a loss of 22,000 RNs nationwide by 2022 will happen if nothing is done to give solution to the problem. Diane Doran, deputy director of the Nursing Health Services Research Unit at the University of Toronto's Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, said that they we're predicting major loss in the nursing workforce for the future.

Doran added that in order to meet the demand, they need to discover new and innovative solutions to delivering the highest quality of care to Canadians. In 2007, the College of Nurses of Ontario achieved the right to standardize three new nurse practitioner specialties namely: nurse practitioners with pediatric specialty; adult nurse practitioners in acute care; and nurse practitioners in anaesthesia. To have a high supply of nurse practitioners with master's degree in nursing, Ontario recently extended its endeavour through establishing four nurse practitioner-led health clinics in northern Ontario.

The expanded scopes of practice are:

• the ability to direct definite diagnostic tests
• prescribe a precise list of medications
• communicate diagnoses to clinicians
• transfer patients to physicians for health-care needs that exceed their scope of practice.

The sector of health-care used a supply-based model of health human resource scheduling in the past. This means that future staffing needs reflected population growth. The model works against the population-needs driven method which was manipulated by the federal government. The growing demand for chronic disease supervision related to an aging population and the awaiting short supply of all health care experts was dealt by the model. Jeanne Besner, director of Health Systems and Workforce Research Unit with Alberta Health Services said that they need to get ahead of the curve to fully develop the knowledge and skills of health-care workers to be able to gather the new and coming needs of the population. There is a shortage of nurses in Canada and it tends to be more severe in rustic areas and with long-term care facilities. Debbie White, Associate Dean of Research at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Nursing, said that there are lots of opportunities for students and they need educators at the graduate level to prepare these graduates. A 2,000 nursing graduates by year 2012 is the vision of the Government of Alberta. Besner said that it's about changing, what they teach, how they teach, and how they practise.