Exploration of Essential Skills for Nurses - Essay Example

?RUNNING HEAD: DEVELOPMENT OF SELF AS NURSE Exploration of Essential skills for Nurses Nursing is a versatile duty that needs to be carried out on various ethical and therapeutic principles on which the patient-nurse relationship is built. Also modern nursing technological innovations pose challenges for the traditional nursing system as well as for the nurses and health care professionals. Prudent application of the principles of nursing can make a nurse successful in his or her career. One should achieve all of the essential nursing skills and have clear understanding of the philosophical connotations of the principles in order to avoid the inclusive confusions. Necessarily these skills include social perceptiveness, reading comprehension, oral comprehension, judgment and decision making, advocacy, compassion, excellent communication and observation skills, ability to answer questions and to work as part of a team, problem sensitivity, critical thinking, etc. Indeed nurses should be skillful enough to apply all of these principles of nursing in order to procure the highest possible excellence in their job. Nurses are to be sincere enough to avoid the subtle violation of the patients’ rights that are provided by these principles. Exploration of Essential skills for Nurses Introduction Nurses are the indispensable component of modern health care industry. A registered nurse must achieve all of the essential nursing skills and have clear understanding of the philosophical connotations of the principles in order to avoid the inclusive confusions. Necessarily these skills include social perceptiveness, reading comprehension, oral comprehension, judgment and decision making, advocacy, compassion, excellent communication and observation skills, ability to answer questions and to work as part of a team, problem sensitivity, critical thinking, etc. Indeed nurses should be skillful enough to apply all of these principles of nursing in order to procure the highest possible excellence in their job. Nurses are to be sincere enough to avoid the subtle violation of the patients’ rights that are provided by these principles. Ability to take the right Decision at right Time One of the most crucial and challenging skill that a nurse urgently should achieve is ‘decision making’ in which the nurses and the health care professionals, who are involved in caring the patients, are faced with several dilemma and crisis. Normally decision-making in nursing includes the ethical values and laws. But some the set of ethical values fails to encapsulate the unexpected situation in the patient’s condition, which often poses difficulties because of the emotional factors, beliefs, etc. Bukhardt and Nathaniel (2002) says, “It can stir numerous emotion laced with both certainty and doubt about the rightness of the decision” (p. 132). Emotion will need an extra concern in such cases in order to avoid the possible unexpected outcomes. Necessarily actions needs to be taken by the participants on the decisions made previously. But certainly “after acting upon the decision, the participants begin a process of response and evaluation” (Bukhardt & Nathaniel, 2002, p. 132). Indeed a health care professional or a nurse should go through four steps: articulation of the problem, Gathering data, Exploration of the strategies, implementing the strategies and Evaluation of the outcome. With the following decision making steps the dilemma of this nurse can be solved: a. Articulation of the problem, b. Gathering data, c. Exploration of the strategies, d. Implementing the strategies and e. Evaluation of the outcome. Social Perceptiveness and Perceiving the Ethical Concerns Nurses have to be socially perceptive and they have a good amount of comprehensive knowledge of the ethics and norms of the community in which they are supposed to work. According to Nightingale nursing should be based on the environmental and social adaptation. For her environment should determine the traits of nursing. The model demonstrates Nightingales' recognition of the spiritual nature of beings, the environmental, biological, psychological and social aspects of care. Nightingale’s model “demonstrates Nightingales' recognition of the spiritual nature of beings, the environmental, biological, psychological and social aspects of care” (Shaner, 2006). Environmental conditions of a patient should be adjusted to facilitate health and healing. Consequently her model advocates for inquiry into the individual and the social levels of sickness of patients. As to adaptation, environmental conditions should be adapted according the patients’ illness. Indeed the model advocates for the “situations where adaptation” is stated by changing a situation, or ‘by the nurse intervening to change the environment”(Tomey & Alligood, 1998, p. 273). Environmental Adaptability and Team Working According to the Environmental Adaptation Theory of nursing a nurse must have the capability to adapt with the continually changing environment of their work places and also to work as a part of a team. Modern health care industry is highly segmented into independently functioning organization units. Indeed a nurse who is supposed to work in such an organizational environment must have the skill to work as an organic part of a team. Environmental Adaptation Theory ensures several approaches towards nursing: 1. Environment oriented adaptation; 2. to explore the patients’ social and environmental condition in order to make the adaptation effective; 3. adaptation should be patient centered; 4. environment as a root factor of the patients’ illness; 5. adaptation should include major traits of patient-nurse relationships which allows fruitful changes (Tomey & Alligood, 1998). Advocacy, Critical Thinking and Ability to Offer Advice In health industry nurses are increasingly expected to play the critical and convoluted three-fold role of reaching the patient with a compassionate mind to perceive what ails them and provide what might put them at ease within the academic boundary of ethics and principles of nursing, while reaching the doctors with the skills and expertise to make the treatment effective at best. Obviously a nurse must have some natural qualities i.e. to be passionate, sympathetic, emotionally attached to the people in distress; but through academic training and education one has to learn to rein and restrain one’s emotion in order to take the right decision in any stressful and critical situation. Also trained nurses should be skillful enough to be adapt themselves with the organizational environment of their workplaces as well as to be an effective associative tool for the doctors. Skill to Create Therapeutic Environment and Identification of Risks A nurse must have the ability to ensure therapeutic environment for the patient in her charge. Nursing a patient may pose danger to the nurse herself and her co-workers. Beside ensuring safety for the patients a nurse should be skilled enough to identify risk factors, and know the precautionary safety measures in order to reduce those risks. Also she is responsible for creating healthy environment for the betterment of the patient as the environment should be adjusted to prevent further physical and mental dangers such as “disturbance”, “illness” or other “disruptive events” (Tomey & Alligood, 2006, p. 213). According to the Environmental adaptation theory it is a challenge for a nurse to adapt the situation of the patient to environmental factors. Communicative Interpersonal Relationship: Oral and Reading Comprehension As most of the nursing theories speak of a dynamic relatedness with environment, nurses are responsible to create partnership-based relationship with patients. Therefore a nurse must be able to communicate with her patients their family members both orally and acoustically. In this way, the nurse-client relationship is an indispensable part of the patient’s environment. In order to contribute to the alleviation of the patient’s mental agony and despair engendered by his ambition and alienation, a nurse must seek to create a friendly environment that provokes the patients to share their psychophysical ailment (Tomey & Alligood, 1998). A nurse must have a good command of the primary language of the patients and the community in which she is supposed to perform her duty, as Tomey and Alligood (1998) say, “To serve as a health care professional, a nurse has to be able to communicate effectively patients and with the other members of the health care team” (p. 29). Having Compassion and Respect for Patients According to the regulations prescribed by the College of Nurses of Ontario, therapeutic nursing is the core of an ideal patient-nurse relationship based on trust, professional intimacy, empathy and respect (RANO, 2006). In the initial stages of the nurse-patient relationship, it is imperative that the nurse should win the trust of her client so that he can rely on her to provide wholesome support. So nurses should be dedicated to “client well-being” which refers to the way of facilitating to the betterment of patients or clients by reducing the possibilities of harm. But the point ‘what is good’ may generate controversy because views of patients and nurses may be different from each other. So according to CNO “In determining the best action, it is necessary, as a beginning point, to differentiate between the nurse’s and the client’s views of what is beneficial” (CNO, 2006, p. 5). Environmental Adaptation Theory advocates for client well being by creating an environment where it is adapted with the patient’s condition (Tomey & Alligood, 1998, p. 115). Ability to cope with the High-Tech Environment of Health Industry In the blooming context of modern technology and science the job of nursing is continually being equipped with technical innovations that pose new challenges for the traditional nursing system as well as for the nurses and health care professionals. But at the same time these technologies are creating more opportunities for the persons involved in this field to excel the quality of their service. Individually the unkempt flow of Information that is escalated by the development in the IT sector has enabled nurses to enrich their knowledge on the subject (AACN, 1999). Nurses are to face with the growing demand of handling the technical devices and the facilities that these devices provide. On the part of the nurses, it is a challenge to utilize these opportunities to ensure the patients’ betterment maintaining the ethics and laws of their job, as it is said that Nursing Informatics has flourished into “a mandatory focus for all registered nurses on a global scale” Presently the term ‘Nursing Informatics’ is a term that is used to illustrate the “integration of nursing science with information and computer science” (Blais, Hayes, Kozier, & Erb, 2006, p. 32). Consequently this is the way that the Health Belief Model is related to the growth of technology. With the help of modern technology, it is easier to motivate “people to take positive health actions that uses the desire to avoid a negative health consequence as the prime motivation” (Blais, Hayes, Kozier, & Erb, 2006, p. 22). Conclusion Nursing is a challenging job that requires a number of essential skills such as social perceptiveness, reading comprehension, oral comprehension, judgment and decision making, advocacy, compassion, excellent communication and observation skills, ability to answer questions and to work as part of a team, problem sensitivity, critical thinking, etc. Well-proportionate and prudent application of all of these theories can make the job reach the zenith of success by establishing successful patient-nurse relationship on the basis of various therapeutic and ethical principles. They are helpful for the nurses to assess, plan, and implement a complete framework of patient care that is seamless in nature. Though technology renders enormous blessing to the profession of nursing, it determines some new challenges that are to be addressed. One has to integrate the ethics, data integrity, confidentiality, and caring for persons and the maintenance of technology-depended environments (Blais, Hayes, Kozier, & Erb, 2006). As a nurse one need to: “use information and communication technologies to enter, retrieve and manipulate data; interpret and organize data into information to affect nursing practice; and combine information to contribute to knowledge development in nursing" (Hebert, 1999, p.6). References American Association of Colleges of Nursing (1999). AACN white paper: Distance technology in nursing education. Author. Retrieved October 6, 2003, from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/publications/positions/whitepaper.htm Alligood, M.R. & Tomey, A M; (2006); Nursing Theory: Utilization and Application; (3rd ed.) (pp. 149-171) St. Louis: Elsevier, Mosby Blais, K. K., Hayes, J. S., Kozier, B., & Erb, G. (2006). Professional nursing practice: Concepts and perspectives (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Burkhardt, M.A. & Nathaniel, A.K. (2002). Ethics & issues in contemporary nursing. 3 Toronto: Delmar Publishers. CNO; (2006); Therapeutic Nurse-Client Relationship; Definition Of Respect; College Of Nurses Of Ontario; Retrieved on 23.09.2008 from http:// www.cno.org/docs/prac/41033_therapeutic.pdf CNO; (2005); Practice Standard: Ethics; Client Well Being; College Of Nurses Of Ontario; Retrieved on 23.09.2008 from http://www.cno.org/docs/prac/41034_ehtics.pdf Hebert, M. (1999). National Nursing Informatics Project Discussion Paper. pp. 6 In Nursing-informatics.com (n.d.) Overview of Competencies. Nursing informatics competencies: self – assessment. . RNAO; (2006); Best Practice Guideline: Client Centered Care; Registered Nurses Association Of Ontario; Retrieved on 23.09.2008 from http://www.rnao.org/storage/15/932_ bpg_cccare_rev06.pdf Shaner RN, H. (2006), Nightingale knew more than she thought, “Nightingale Institute for Health and the Environment”. Retrieved on 23.09.2008 from http://www.nihe.org/enviropn.html           Tomey, A. M., & Alligood, M. R. (1998). Nursing theorists and their work (pp. 102-175). St. Louis: Mosby. Read More