¶ … old Chinese proverb that I believe encompasses my feelings for the nursing profession. With the healthcare industry in its current state of disruption, it has become very important to re-evaluate the relationship of patient care and patient satisfaction. "Sometimes patient satisfaction needs to be measured one patient at a time. This usually has nothing to do with the impersonality of the plan, the aloofness of the provider, or the quality of the specialists to whom one is referred. Rather, it involves the basic rationing philosophies of HMOs, particularly the for-profit variety." (Birenbaum, 107) We can't forget that the business objectives of HMO's aim to purchase services and materials at the lowest price possible and trying to lock in a price in advance. HMO's have therefore changed the philosophy of the healthcare industry. As nurses, we have to make the best of this atmosphere. This essay therefore serves as the final writing assignment for our course and represents a culmination of all of our previous class assignments. The underlying focus of this work was to present my new found insights into what professionalism and the responsibilities of nursing are. I have learned a great many things and I now consider nursing professionalism to represent a certain display of confidence because we have acquired unique traits and a base of knowledge from a very specialized discipline of study and practice. Of course many other medical professionals have this attitude because I now understand that the field of medicine entails these specialized skills, a need for constant self-evaluation and self-improvement, constant service orientations, pride in the profession, a covenantal relationship with our patients, creativity, trustworthiness, accountability, ethical behavior, and of course leadership. This attidude is in...

Being a professional in this case also means teamwork.
During class, I had the privilege of reading "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and found that I really enjoyed it. The Fadiman story was a priceless study in cross cultural medicine. I believe the book served as a guide to reflect on things that we take for granted because we are professionals. It was a persuasive anthropological study of the Hmong people and one family of the group in particular. The group was portrayed as one with a strong established culture that combined concern in regard to healthcare with their pious spirituality. The problem was that by western standards, the Hmong line of medical reasoning was considered to be primitive.

Lia Lee and her family were taken from Merced, CA, a large Hmong community and were thrown into the modern western world. Unfortunately, Lia suffered from seizures from the age of three months. Her father associated the seizures as the result of his other children slamming doors which was an obvious religious medical association. In reality, the Lee's thought that the baby's soul had been scared away from her earthly body and therefore she became a malignant or split spirit. Lia needed professional help but the Lee's saw professionals as shamanistic doctors. Because Lia was epileptic, she was also predicted to late become a shaman. "Hmong consider qaug dab peg [epilepsy] to be an illness of some distinction" and "Hmong epileptics often become shamans." (Fadiman 21)

Therefore, the…