Introduction
Titilope Olalekan is a registered nurse working at BronxCare Hospital and holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Titilope Olalekan asserts that he chose the profession of nursing because he loves making positive impacts on patients’ lives daily. He reiterates that nursing is a profession that makes a massive difference to an individual and society. Among other reasons for following his heart and becoming a registered nurse was his sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when helping people whenever possible. As a registered nurse, he has the opportunity of treating, educating, healing, and assisting patients in diverse ways daily. Nursing is always interesting with daily challenges that one overcomes in unimaginable ways and what one does matters because it impacts the life of someone.
Main body
BronxCare is one of the most significant voluntary, not-for-profit health and teaching hospital systems that serve the south and the central Bronx, with more than 4,500 workers and 859 beds. The hospital has two main divisions that deliver the community’s highest quality and accessible services, including an extensive outpatient network, a long-term care facility, and comprehensive psychiatric and chemical dependency programs. In New York City, BronxCare is among the most extensive outpatient services providers, with nearly one million annual visits. Its emergency response is one of the busiest in New York as it responds to 141,000 visits yearly. BronxCare Health System became fully accredited by the Joint Commission in 2017 (“BronxCare health system,” n.d.). It has a medical school affiliation with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and sixteen accredited residency and fellowship programs. The National Center for Quality Assurance certified the outpatient practice of BronxCare as a Level Three Patient-Centered Medical Home. BronxCare hospital is driven by its goal of causing positive change in the community. As a result, it has developed diverse capital projects such as the Life Recovery Center for chemical dependency services, Health and Wellness Center for outpatient care, and a state-of-the-art Cancer Care facility that meet patients’ demands.
As a registered nurse at BronxCare hospital, key roles and responsibilities of Olalekan are collaborating with teams for patient care, monitoring patient health and vital signs, administering treatments and medicines, and performing diagnostic tests. Registered nurses make an immense contribution to healthcare that cannot be underestimated. Among other roles of Olalekan in the work environment and specialty entails collecting patient health histories, counseling, interpreting decisions made by patients regarding their actions, and making consultations to determine the best interventions. Nurses work tirelessly, caring for the spiritual, emotional, and physical needs of the sick and touching people across communities, backgrounds, ethnic groups, and all ages. At the hospital, Titilope Olalekan asserts that his clienteles are 66% Hispanic, 29% African Americans and other ethnic groups amount to 5% (“BronxCare health system,” n.d.).
There are unique challenges in nursing that nurses encounter daily in their line of duty as they make a difference in the countless lives they touch. It is essential to understand nursing challenges to find ways of coping and developing self-care. At BronxCare, Olalekan experienced numerous staffing issues, patient harassment, physicality, workplace hazards, technology, and long working hours. In nursing, a long hour is a consistent challenge that nurses experience due to highly demanding schedules as it is a round-the-clock job, and over time, nurses feel drained, exhausted, and stressed. The effect of long working hours can pose new challenges that impact the ability to devote undivided attention to the needs of a family and self-care. Long working hours also cause physical challenges because nurses spend most of their time on their feet, lifting patients, and accessing equipment that exposes them to high rates of work-related injuries. The most common injuries or ailments that nurses experience due to physical challenges are back injuries, leg pain, and shoulder injuries. Nurses are also likely to get in contact with sicknesses daily that pose a threat to their health.
Furthermore, bullying and harassment are severe issues in healthcare, and nurses are no exception. Harassment and bullying affect the compassionate world that nurses live in as they might originate from medical staff and nurses’ colleagues. Patients and their families can also be sources of bullying, which can be done through inappropriate communication. The shortage of nurses is a prime challenge in nursing, and it causes nurses to be stretched thin and overworked. Short staffing is typical because fewer nurses are available to replace those retiring, and as a result, they do not adequately provide care. In the modern world, technology has advanced in healthcare and caused a positive impact on the profession, with nurses required to learn new skills continually. However, it is challenging to keep up with newly emerging technologies with their long working hours.
In the current U.S. healthcare system, nurses form the backbone of the industry, playing roles in the coordination of care from multifaced providers, helping patients transition from hospital to home, and managing patients’ intense care needs. Titilope Olalekan perceives working in the current U.S. healthcare system as fulfilling when he makes a positive difference in daily life. However, according to Tumialán (2019), the current U.S. healthcare system is a model of inefficiency and the most expensive system globally. Olalekan asserts that the U.S. healthcare system can be improved by having better staffing, more empowerment for healthcare professionals, and more preventative care and early interventions. Improvement of the healthcare system revolves around the promotion of quality, affordability, and access to services.
The interviewee is a first-line worker and asserts to have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic both emotionally and mentally. Like any other nurse, he describes that he faces challenges while administering treatment to COVID-19 patients, creating appropriate long-term and short-term approaches, and reducing infection from spreading. Besides treating COVID-19 patients, healthcare professionals must continuously treat patients without COVID-19 and take care of themselves and their families (Short, 2021). However, balancing between self-care, family care, and caring for patients poses stress, psychological burdens, and increased rates of burnout. Nevertheless, for individuals interested in working in the healthcare sector, Titilope Olalekan recommends that it is essential to never give up on one’s dreams or lose perspective as it is rewarding in the long run. Nursing is all about what an individual wants while working in the healthcare industry, such as making a difference in the wellness of people and the desire to help a given population.
Olalekan perceives that if allowed to implement change in the healthcare sector, his greatest desire is to change his job’s bureaucracy. He feels that nurses are neither respected nor adequately rewarded but instead made to work like robots and expected to deliver the best care possible. Minimization of bureaucracy will result in healthcare workers providing a conducive environment for innovation within the hospital. Changing management has the potential to cause the effective and efficient performance of professionals.
Summary
The interview was conducted with Titilope Olalekan, who depicted that people choose to work in nursing because of their love for positively impacting people’s lives and society. Olalekan works as a registered nurse at BronxCare hospital, which offers healthcare and teaching hospital systems. His role included offering patient health education, administering medication and treatment, working with other teams for patient care, performing diagnoses, and monitoring vital signs and the health of patients. At the hospital, Olalekan asserted administering healthcare to all people from a diverse ethnic background, with the majority being Hispanic, followed by African-American. He also portrayed that in the nursing profession, nurses encounter challenges in their line of work that they must understand and find means of coping to create better self-care. Nurses’ challenges include burnout, workplace hazards, patient harassment, staffing issues, technological advancement, and physicality. Olalekan depicted that if the challenges are not adequately managed, they impact nurses’ performance, which leads to poor service delivery and low patient outcome.
Furthermore, it was depicted that nurses are the cornerstone of the current healthcare system in the U.S. as they play key roles in coordinating care from myriad providers and assisting patients in managing their needs. From Olalekan’s perspective, he asserted that the U.S. healthcare system revolves around three things that can be improved: quality promotion, access to services, and affordability. Considering the present state of a pandemic outbreak, Olalekan asserted that the COVID-19 pandemic has a detrimental impact on the emotional and psychological well-being of nurses as they associate themselves directly with COVID-19 patients. Nurses experience high rates of burnout and psychological burdens while treating COVID-19 patients because of the need to balance between patients, family, and self-care, resulting in stress and anxiety. To combat the challenges experienced in nursing, Olalekan depicted that one needs to remain focused and understand the reason for choosing the profession, and be involved in implementing changes in the job.
References
BronxCare health system. (n.d.). Web.
Short, N. M. (2021). Informing public policy: An important role for registered nurses. Milstead’s Health Policy & Politics: A Nurse’s Guide, 1.
Tumialán, L. M. (2019). Healthcare systems in the United States. In Editors? Quality Spine Care (pp. 155-169). Springer, Cham.