Nursing professionalization and welfare state policies: A critical review of structural factors influencing the development of nursing and the nursing workforce

Abstract

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country-level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill-level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings.

Nursing Now 2020: the Nightingale Challenge

“…This requires a concerted global effort by all, but especially governing authorities to make this a reality, by providing legal and policy frameworks that will allow the two professions to practice to the top of their licence. However, there remains much inconsistency in the professional capabilities of the nurse and midwife between countries and regions (Gunn et al ), highlighting the need to review nursing and midwifery scopes of practice and educational preparation at national level.…”

Gender equality policies, nursing professionalization, and the nursing workforce: A cross-sectional, time-series analysis of 22 countries, 2000–2015

“…Our study builds on findings from a recent critical review of health and sociopolitical literature, which highlights that multifaceted links exist between professionalization and gender inequality across various socioeconomic and political domains (Gunn, Muntaner, Villeneuve, Chung, & Gea-Sanchez, 2018). We capitalize on the current scholarship preoccupied with the macro-determinants of nursing professionalization, including education and health policy initiatives (Aiken, Cheung, & Olds, 2009;Squires, Uyei, Beltran-Sanchez, & Jones, 2016), adding a new perspective, that of macro-level gender policies.…”

“…Given that a comprehensive literature review on this topic identified a number of macrolevel welfare state factors that could influence indicators of nursing professionalization, including health, education, and labour market policies (Gunn et al, 2018), in this analysis, we considered the following control factors indicators of such policies: health care spending (public/private), public coverage for health care, public education sector funding, length of maternity and paternity leaves, and trade union density rates. In addition, given that various measures of a country's economic development have been previously linked to the number of health professionals, including nurses (Squires, 2007;Wharrad & Robinson, 1999), although, in some studies, such findings did not apply to OECD countries (Currie & Carr-Hill, 2012), both gross domestic product per capita and gross domestic product annual growth rate were also considered as control variables.…”

Vloga prve skrbstvene sestre Angele Boškin pri profesionalizaciji slovenske zdravstvene nege

“…Pomembno je, da imajo ne glede na strokovno področje vsi poklici skupne temeljene elemente, ki so bili prepoznani s pomočjo raziskovalnega dela (Bixler & Bixler, 1959;Schein & Kommers, 1972;Quinn & Smith, 1987;Miller, et al, 1993;Lindberg, et al, 1998;Muller, 2018;Gunn, et al, 2019). Prepoznavnost teh elementov vodi v družbeno in akademsko priznanje zdravstvene nege (Bixler & Bixler, 1959;Quinn & Smith, 1987;Miller, et al, 1993;Lindberg, et al, 1998;Skela-Savič, 2017a;Gunn, et al, 2019). Ti elementi, ki smo jih v našem prostoru na osnovi večletnega raziskovalnega dela terminološko prilagodili zdravstveni negi in so aplikativni tudi za druge zdravstvene poklice, so:…”