Strategies for ethical nursing practice through mentoring and clinical supervision

Mentoring and Supporting Others

The current healthcare system necessitates that nurses should possess strong medical-technical skills and the ability to focus on the ethical dimension of care. It is quite challenging for nurses to cope with the ethical dimension of care in practice. Frequently, nurses are not capable of acting in accordance to their personal norms and values. This produces internal moral suffering that has negative influence on nurses and patients. Ethical practice entails the reasoning procedure, the related decisions, and the actual execution of the ethical decisions. Ethical reasoning includes the cognitive procedure of reasoning that leads to ethical making of decisions (Goethals, Gastmans, & de Casterle, 2010).

Strategies

For nurses to be inspired to care, there is a reported necessity for organizational leadership to: offer ample time for patient care; sustain ample support for the level of environmental intricacy, and encourage collegial; open communication; and, expert autonomy in the health care setting. In the clinical practice setting, nurses' inspiration to care encourages competence, which consequently supports the clients' natural inspiration to act on suitable health practices. Nurses' motivation to care could eventually encourage improved patient health results (Fairchild, 2010).

Staff development

Mentorship is also suitable for the ones pursuing further training and qualifications or moving to clinical specialties like palliative care. It might also be part of personal leadership and team development programs. In this case, nurses ought to choose what competency they would wish to develop and pick a mentor that they respect and that is more knowledgeable in the suitable area. For instance, a nurse undertaking a leadership development program might select a local nurse leader to provide mentorship on, for instance, the way to manage a team through motivation and inspiration (Nash & Scammell, 2010).

Clinical Supervision

The NMC (2008b) mentioned that it permits a registered nurse to get expert supervision in the workplace by a skilled supervisor. It permits midwives and nurses to build their competencies and knowledge and assists them to enhance care (Nash & Scammell, 2010).

Action Learning

Action learning is all about reflection as well as experience learning. It can be viewed as a type of group teaching. The facilitator concentrates on the procedure of working in the group to promote basic skills for good communication and efficient working relationships. Everybody in the group gets equal space and time from the facilitator that provides a balance of encouragement and challenge, active listening and evades making judgments or trivializing matters (Nash & Scammell, 2010).

Measuring the Success

Qualitative Feedback

Qualitative measures could be efficiently utilized to evaluate the personal objectives of the mentorship program. Interviews or surveys could be utilized at the conclusion of the mentorship program to evaluate the mentoring pairs' thoughts of how properly the personal objectives were met (McCormick, 2014).

KPIs

Once the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are determined, an organization could determine targets as well as segments. By establishing this procedure, goals shall become SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. An appropriate practice that could be applied by organizations is to measure the improvement for a particular segment against the organizational baseline, or a different population segment (Fickenscher, 2013).