Occupational Nurses Problems

Occupational nurses should offer options for prevention at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. At the primary level, they should promote health and protect workers against possible health threats. This prevention option is applied before the possible problem develops.  At the secondary level, screening for safety and rectifying any damages before injuries occur. At this level, the problem has started developing but has caused a lesser effect. The problem can be handled by dealing with the causative agents. At the tertiary level, nurses are expected to prevent further effects from a given problem. The cause of the problem cannot be handled and the only way to deal with it is limiting further damage.

Ethical Dilemma

During this practice, occupational nurses are faced with a number of ethical dilemmas. To start with, concerns associated with confidentiality of workers health records are common. Secondly, in some cases nurses perceive that opening up to a patient may cause more harm than good. In such cases a nurse finds it had to disclose truthful information with the fear of the patients reaction. This happens in situations with patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Lastly, consent to treatment in some patients is also another ethical issue. These ethical challenges seem to be more challenging to occupational nurses who have worked for shorter durations because of lesser experience.

Summary

The societys health and well being directly depends on the efficiency of the health services and its personnel. The public health nursing profession has changed over time and has had a number of advancements. Despite all this progress, it is still faced with challenges. Nurses have come up with different interventions to improve the efficiency of their work but some challenges are yet to get remedies. We hope that more interventions will be found in a bid to eradicate setbacks facing the nursing profession.

References

Stanhope, M., & Lancaster, J. (2014). Public health nursing. St. Louis, Mo.: Mosby Elsevier.

Guzik, A. (2013). Essentials for occupational health nursing. Ames, Iowa: Wiley-Blackwell, a John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Publication.

Abrams, S. (2012). Persistent Problems and Collective Response-Ability. Public Health Nursing, 29(6), 479-480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/phn.12011