Implementation of the IOM Future of Nursing Report

Grand Canyon University
Trends and Issues in Health Care
NRS-440V

August 09, 2013

Implementation of the IOM Future of Nursing Report
In 2010, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provided many people access to previously unavailable health care coverage. The goals of the reform are to make health care accessible and affordable to all Americans by controlling insurance costs by making rates similar across all states, standardizing coverage and ensuring that quality care is delivered at all times (Graszkruger, 2011). The health care system and nursing are evolving. The reform provided nurses an important opportunity to lead in the changes. The largest sector of the health care industry workforce is nursing with millions of members (IOM, 2011). The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the IOM collaborated over a two-year period starting in 2008 in the evaluation of the importance of changes in nursing in relation to the transforming landscape in health care. IOM chose a committee that came up with outlines of the necessary changes that nursing needs to make to meet the increasing needs of the system. The committee was tasked with the development of recommendations that will address the need for nurses to be active participants in the design and implementation of efficient and effective health care system. The committee came up with the following four areas of focus for nurses: maximizing their education and training; need to achieve higher education, need to be full partners in health care leadership activities and workforce policy based on data (RWJF, 2011). Their work in these areas led to eight recommendations all geared towards ensuring that nurses are adequately prepared to fulfill their critical role in ensuring that all patients receive quality and safe health care services. This paper