Nursing Original Understanding of What it Meant

Nursing

Original understanding of what it meant to be an RN

Being a Registered Nurse meant applying evidence-based practice to patient care. It meant doing whatever it took to make patients as comfortable as possible, listening closely to their needs, and to the concerns they and their family presented to the healthcare team and me. Being a Registered Nurse meant collaborating with my colleagues and other members of the healthcare team to provide the best quality of care for each and every patient, under the circumstances. My original understanding of what it meant to be an RN included having the necessary training, background, and experience to be a primary care provider.

Current expanded view of what it means to be an RN

Since taking this course, I have acknowledged the "substantial expansion" in the RN workforce over the past several years (Staiger, Auerbach, & Buerhaus, 2012, p. 1). Understanding the nursing market better than I did prior to the course, I also better understand my role as a Registered Nurse within a large healthcare organization. Now, I can see that nurses do much more than interact with patients, provide bedside care through hand holding and bedpan cleaning, and monitoring vital signs. I know now that nurses are leaders, and possibly future administrators. Some RNs will become politicians and policy makers. I have learned that there is more to being a RN than I thought before this class.

My expanded view of what it means to be an RN also includes my role within the organization as a team player. I knew before that nurses are members of a broader healthcare team, but now I know that nurses who rely on evidence-based practice are more likely to be taken seriously by those around them, including the patient. Therefore, nurses have an expanded role than they used to, and I learned that only by taking this course and reading peer-reviewed literature. Knowing what I know now from reading peer-reviewed literature, and after taking this course, it seems that being an RN means much more than caring for patients. It means losing sight of the goal of patient care, in order to reference peer-reviewed journals for no reason whatsoever other than to create an artificial body of knowledge that can be inflated to serve the need of future nurses attending for-profit educational institutions.

Discussion using two (2) aspects of the modified Stripling Model of Inquiry

The Stripling Model of Inquiry is based on "active engagement," (Berger, 2010, p. 16). According to the Library of Congress, inquiry is important to student learning because "the understandings that students develop through inquiry are deeper and longer lasting than any pre-packaged knowledge delivered by teachers to students," ("Why is Inquiry Important for Student Learning?" n.d., p. 1). There are six distinct phases of the Stripling Model of Inquiry, including connecting, wondering, investigating, constructing, expressing, and reflecting. Although these phases seem and often can be linear, in reality, these are "recursive" phases in which the inquirer can engage in at any point (Berger, 2010). Connecting refers to connecting with one's own prior knowledge and background, which is one of the reasons why I answered the first question in this assignment related to what I believed it meant to be a Registered Nurse prior to taking this course. By asking and answering this question, I was connecting with my former self and my prior state of knowledge. Making that connection, I was able to connect also with my present understanding, outlined in the second section of this report. Furthermore, connection can also relate to future understanding. This phase of the Stripling Model will resurface as I continue to engage the question of what it means to be a nurse, and as I advance my career through whatever means possible. Finally, connecting means connecting what I see and do each day as an actual nurse and being able to apply evidence to that situation so that I am using evidence-based practice.

The wondering phase of the Stripling Model has allowed me to make predictions and hypotheses that can be tested in the future. This can be applied to how I have expanded my understanding of what it means to be a Registered Nurse. The Library of Congress lauds the importance of using primary sources at all stages of learning, because "by their very nature, primary sources engage students in inquiry," ("Why is Inquiry Important for Student Learning?" n.d., p. 1). Reading this made me wonder why I was prohibited from using primary source material written by Barbara Stripling herself to describe the Stripling Model of Inquiry. Barbara Stripling described her models of inquiry prior to 2006, rendering the information too out of date for the purposes of completing this assignment. Yet the Stripling Model of Inquiry encourages the use of primary sources.