A Nurse Themed Reflection

¶ … difficult because I was being introduced to everything. I had no idea that being a nurse meant integrating information for so many diverse fields. When I finished the week I had learned and grown so much as an individual and as a nursing student. I learned that I needed to be acquainted with various subjects in order to pull information and reference things that could help me perform my duties as a nurse.

I also learned of the many new topics of interest in current healthcare and how a field like genetics could play a role in medicine and treatments. The focus of nursing is quality improvement and the first week helped me understand how to pursue quality care. The second course week I learned how to build processes that promote quality improvement as well as safety in healthcare delivery. I had to learn how to be a leader and promote safe patient care.

The focus of the week was on making ethical and critical decisions and promoting effective working relationships that I feel will prepare me for a career in nursing. Nurses are leaders in their own right. The job of a nurse requires excellent critical thinking skills and adhering to a strict ethical standard (Glazer, & Fitzpatrick, 2013). This week helped me understand this and continue to fan my interest in pursuing a golden standard of care for my future patients. The third course week represented another hurdle.

Communication is an important aspect to nursing. Without proper communication, quality in delivery of healthcare greatly diminishes. The effective use of modern communication modalities taught me that I can use several ways to communicate efficiently with others. Technological innovations have allotted nurses in the present day to communicate online through email, even a chat interface. Patients can also gain access to their medical records in some hospitals and clinics and send messages to healthcare providers.

Being aware of these options helps me understand what tools I have at my disposal when it comes to communication and nursing. The fourth week involved assessing the design, implementations, and results of approaches formulated to meet the demands and healthcare needs of patients. This meant the translation and integration of scholarship into practice. So whatever I learned that week and the weeks prior, now it was my chance to figure out how to apply that in the real world.

Practical application of theory involves taking what is learned and then configuring it in a way that provides developmental insight into how to do things. My biggest takeaway was learning how to implement theory into practice. The fifth week, I learned to develop a plan for lifelong professional as well as personal growth that also combines my professional values regarding service, global engagement, and scholarship.

Bringing back to week 1, I had to imagine integrating all kinds of information from different sciences into a plan that I could follow for the rest of my life. For example, genetics has had recent breakthroughs that could lead to innovative and highly effective gene therapies (Lilley, Collins, & Snyder, 2015, p. 98).

If I wanted to be an oncology nurse, I could also take the information I gain from studying genetics and apply that to the care of my patients since some genetic conditions predispose some people to certain cancers like for example the breast cancer gene, BRCA1 (Gibbon, Joseph, Mozersky, Zur Nieden, & Palfner, 2014, p. 56). By individuals getting screened for this gene, they can take the precautionary measures to avoid developing breast cancer. Course week 6 taught me about the legal and ethical implications of being a nurse.

As a nurse I am liable for the safety of the patient under my care. If I for example, do not dispose of a used needle properly and prick another patient with the used needle, I can put the hospital or clinic I work in, in major legal turmoil.

Patient safety is of the utmost concern when working as a nurse practitioner and things like medications and dosing need to be confirmed in order to avoid wrongful death lawsuits and all other kinds of situations that could put myself and the hospital/clinic in jeopardy. Course week 7 taught me the importance of interprofessional collaboration. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners come together to work for the common goal of improving patient care.

Patient care is paramount and providing high quality care requires collaboration not just from nurses and physicians, but pharmacists and medical assistants. Patient education is another important aspect of patient care, especially when it comes to management of chronic illness. It is always.