Expanded Role of Nurses
Nurses have gone beyond the confines of simply following doctors’ orders and providing basic comfort and care. They now perform sophisticated assessments, diagnose nursing problems, monitor and give complicated treatments, use alternative modalities of care, and particularly in geriatric care settings, increasingly make independent judgments about patients’ clinical conditions. This wider scope of functions, combined with higher salaries and greater status, has increased the accountability and responsibility of nurses for the care of patients.