Most people would normally think that nurses only play a critical role in the actual practice of patient care. While this may be true up to a certain extent, the idea that nursing practice and patient care itself is a continuously evolving practice cannot be ignored. The roles of nurses are continuously expanding and becoming more specific. There are for example, nurses these days who call themselves sexual health nurses. These are typically the nurses who are responsible of administering drug injections and other primary and secondary nursing care practices to patients who have sexually related cases such as gonorrhea and hepatitis B for example .
It is common among community nurses, even for those who are assigned to monitor and manage the health and wellness of people in rural villages, particularly in the rural villages of Australia, to focus on sexual health and sexual education programs in a bid to decrease the booming prevalence rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Most teenagers and young adults in these areas are poorly educated about the possible negative health implications of unprotected sex and as someone who is knowledgeable in sexual education; a community nurse can do a good job of spreading the word and warning the residents about the major drawbacks of unprotected sex.
This would seem to be an effective enough strategy to combat the booming prevalence rates of sexually transmitted diseases—considering the fact that the only reason behind such boom is lack of education and not pure stubbornness which is out of the scope of this paper, but it really is not. Nurses being assigned in the rural areas of Australia are particularly limited considering the patient to nurse ratio in metropolitan areas of the country. Thus, the impact of nurses in this great inequality can be rebalanced by significantly increasing the volume of nurses who get rotated in the rural areas of Australia. That way, the government and the public can be sure that more and more people will be educated not only in the sexual aspect of health but in all areas of it .
Bibliography
Jackson, V. (2011). What is the role of the school nurse in sexual health education. NASH Sch Nurse Journal, 146-147.
O'Keefe, E. (2005). The Evolution of Sexual Health Nursing in Australia: A Literature Review. Journal of Sexual Health, 33-37.
