Open Access

Annelie Thor, Patrick Siegfried

• Aim: The aim of this scientific paper was to examine important trends and developments influencing the nursing care in order to forecast future opportunities and challenges and how to deal with them in the best possible way. Background: The Corona-pandemic demonstrated the importance of nursing care in the entire world and had drawn attention to the issue of a well-educated and enough nursing staff. The nursing care will face opportunities and challenges due to current trends and developments, which are important to examine in order to provide the best possible nursing care. Methods: To reach the above-mentioned aim, intensive research was done by using secondary sources and surveys. Results/Findings: After a detailed analysis of the research it can be summarized that there are three important topics influencing the nursing care: The demographical development with an increasing life expectancy leading to an increasing amount of old people with a demand for care and decreasing birth rates leading to less working people. Cultural transformation and diversity imply many opportunities because the employment market can fill gaps with foreign workers and the immigrating people can compensate the decreasing birth rates. Nevertheless, it can imply many challenges and potential problems which need to be solved by the society and the immigrating people. Furthermore, the changing gender roles can lead to more men becoming a nurse, which might have a significant impact on the shortage of nursing staff. The third important topic influencing the nursing care is technological trends which can help to decrease physiological stress, by facilitating the nurses’ work and by taking over some work from them. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the trends and developments influencing the nursing care are very diverse and imply many different opportunities as well as challenges.