Trends in nursing are the influences that have shaped or changed the way the nursing profession used to be. They either negatively affect or improve nursing operations and can be social, legislative, cultural, or even political. These changing patterns affect how healthcare facilities operate today. Some trends include the education of nurses, technology advancements, war and its effects on nursing, skills and new sciences, etc.

I currently work in a certain healthcare facility, Dodge Park Nursing Home. Despite operations seeming to be running out smoothly in this healthcare facility, it is largely affected by the trend of expensive healthcare services. The high costs of nursing equipment and facilities, drugs, and even the ever-rising cost of living have made healthcare services to be expensive in this healthcare facility. Due to the increase in the cost of healthcare services, patient care is endangered (a large percentage of the patients say that they put off or skipped their prescribed medicines at some point due to their high costs), and also the financial burden of those with life-threatening diseases becomes unendurable (Cho, 2018). Moreover, the patients with medical insurance are also not spared since most of them report a struggle in meeting the expense of out-of-pocket costs. In my view, this trend affects not only the patients but also us healthcare workers. The high costs of medical services have sometimes led to low patient turnover rates, which has, in turn, decreased earnings.

Healthcare trends also impact nursing management. For instance, the management will be pushed to incur more high costs by the trend of technology advancements. Technology advancement will require healthcare facility equipment to either be improved or replaced with new equipment that uses the current technology. Some of the medical equipment and tools are very expensive, which will impact the management negatively because it will require more extra costs to purchase this equipment. Furthermore, nursing workforce issues influence and impact nursing management. The need for qualified and experienced healthcare workers has led to the shortage of nurses in many healthcare facilities. The workforce issues have increased the workloads of the healthcare workers, which mostly has affected their performance (has led to mistakes and other inefficiencies). The management faces a challenge in finding qualified healthcare personnel (Hernández et al, 2020). New science and skills in nursing also impact nursing management. New science means that the management will either have to look for more healthcare workers with the new skills or teach the currently employed staff the new skills. In my opinion, this is costly and will affect the management negatively.

In Massachusetts, health care laws impacting my nursing practice are the advanced disclosure of patient bills or charges and the law of individual health coverage. In my opinion, the law of advanced disclosure of patient bills is sometimes challenging. This law is challenging because knowing the exact amount to charge a patient before the treatment is over is hard. For example, when a patient is admitted, the medical costs accrue daily, and it is hard to inform patients about the bill before discharge. The law of individual health coverage includes subsidized health costs for patients below the Federal Poverty Level, which is sometimes hard to meet.