Communication
In addition to gaining knowledge, experience, and training for becoming a better health care practitioner, one of the most valuable aspects of going from a bachelor's degree-prepared nurse to a master's degree-prepared family nurse practitioner is learning about and fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of communication. Going through this school of nursing program to become a family nurse practitioner has made me acutely aware of the value of collaboration in nursing, which is facilitated in great part via communication with others. Such communication is substantially more involved than merely taking orders from a physician or some other authoritative health care worker, and actually pertains to a multi-faceted method working in concert with others in ways that are both direct and indirect. Of the former, the forming and fulfillment of collaborations and partnerships plays a big part, whereas the latter is widely effected through engaging with the nationwide and global nursing community through the reading and publication of research papers, which involves scholarly writing and the occasional presentation.
Prior to beginning this program, I was significantly less aware of the responsibility of a nurse from an overarching standpoint of which communication is the focal point. This program has taught me that my responsibilities are not only to the professionals I interact with on a daily basis and the patients that we individually and collectively...
By communicating with one another through becoming cognizant of the results of and participating in original research, we can improve our prowess, our practice, and the health of patients in general. I now know how important it is to keep abreast with research and practices in this field, to help improve it as a whole.
Honestly, the part of the program that most helped me was the engagement with research within this field. This engagement came in the form of studying evidence-based practices, learning new techniques, and implementing them in my daily activity. Doing so was also key to the communication skills which I fostered in this program, because reading and learning about contemporary studies in this field frequently served as a point of conversation between myself and my colleagues. Either they or I would broach a topic related to our jobs, which would inevitably lead to insightful discussion on both parts which was usually productive. Even if we did not necessarily readily adopt these strategies, they would serve as a point of cognizance and awareness of issues which we otherwise would not have been exposed to. Additionally, by conducting research and writing academic papers about them, I was also able to broaden my horizons and general awareness of nursing issues. In this regard, I wish the school of nursing could have assigned more research papers for me to perform…
