Evidence based nursing coaching style management Article

Evidence based nursing coaching style management - Article Example This inadvertently has a number of employment policy implications. Replacing and recruiting people to make up for the older nurses who are near retirement age is infact a very significant problem for the health sector. Nursing itself is comprised of several smaller sub-divisons and there is much evidence to reveal that the ratio of the nursing work force is not equally divided within these sub groups. Careful analysis reveals that prison services, the armed forces, local authorities, occupational health nursing and emergency health services are some of the divisons that do not suffer from a shortfall with respect to the workforce number. Interestingly nursing homes for the elderly are increasingly being seen as having fewer and fewer trained nurse practitioners and in many cases even trained personnel. The reason for this anomalous distribution remains largely unclear and it is a problem the health sector is now grappling with. The UK nursing work force in particular provides a very complete picture in this respect. (Buchan 1999). It is a problem which infact has become the subject of much research and study over the last decade. Demographics reveal that the UK population in general is ageing, and the nursing workforce in the region is no exception. It is a growing population with a greater number of elderly people, which is ensured by advances in medical practice and technology which has resulted in increased life span of the population. Consequently a growing challenge for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is providing adequate nursing facility for its population. The key element of effective nursing coaching in the present scenario is to develop appropriate workforce planning mechanisms that take into account the supply and demand for nursing staff. Quite evidently these should take into account the demographics (i.e the age and type) of the client population and the workforce, and aim to reach a balance of demand and supply as may be the requirement of the market. Infact it can be safely said that the continued prevalence of the shortage of nursing workforce over the past decade could be considered a result of some shortcoming the coaching style for nurses. Both as educators or as nurse practitioners we need to look at the plausible shortcoming of the present coaching style since it is obviously unable to adequately address this problem! Some of the major reasons for people taking up nursing as a career option are because of the opportunities to care for people, to gain some autonomy at the work place and also to be fairly rewarded both financially and emotionally (Irvine and Evans 1995). This has to be taken into account for future training strategies in nursing if the present shortage particularly in geriatric (old age) wards is to be addressed. Coaching styles have to focus on increasing motivation for and clearly elucidating the potential incentives of nursing in general and geriatric nursing in particular. Intervention strategies Nursing and midwifery have traditionally relied on a fairly narrow defined group of school leavers (predominantly female) for recruitment purposes. This population in general is less inclined to work with the elderly population to begin with. In addition geriatric nursing does