Reflective Practice in Nursing - Essay Example

"Reflective Practice in Nursing" is a great example of a paper on care.
Reflection is essential in the nursing profession as it encourages nurses to reflect upon their actions in order to learn from them and gain much-needed knowledge. I sort to gain more insight into this by interviewing a number of nurses. The interview process appealed to me as it seemed both captivating and informative, though it proved a bit labor-intensive and cumbersome. I handed out the interview tools by giving questionnaires to any willing participants whenever I came across them, but noted with a lot of concern, that only one returned the questionnaire to be reasonably fast. Moreover, I had to track down the remaining nurses and ask them to complete the questionnaires and ensure they returned the same to me. I also noted that the nurses used different approaches in answering the questions, but arrived at a number of common trends in their responses. It was rather like a map with many roads all leading to the same place. A majority of the nurses’ responses centered on: maintaining moral and ethical responsibility; preventing adverse outcomes in inpatient treatment and maintaining the patients and their individual rights. All the nurses, at different levels, aimed to set the highest professional standards in the provision of care to the patients (Bolton, 2010).

Through the interview process, I realized that some of my duties as the charge nurse overlap with those of my colleagues and subordinates as I regularly perform the same duties I assign to them. I noted that I sometimes take up the responsibilities of the administrative nurse in delegating patient care duties to the subordinate staff; giving direct patient care like the staff nurse; frequently educating patients on their distinctive diseases and their medication just like the nurse educator. Moreover, the interviewees noted that, much like themselves, I also seek ways of improving patient care delivery by collaborating with the members of the healthcare team by assessing the patients’ conditions and engaging in intense discussions to find the best possible solutions. In her questionnaire, the administrative nurse gave a perfect example of the role of nursing in the protection of human dignity and ethics. She noted that the code blue unit in our facility was faulty, and she recalled a situation where it had cost a patient’s life. She highlighted that during that incident; the deceased patient’s family members were hysterical and angry and bombarded the nurses with a multitude of questions. The nursing administrator, myself, and the primary nurse were, however, able to sort through the patient’s records, convey the relevant information to the family members, and mitigate their concerns. Through such cooperation, we were able to preserve the patient’s dignity even in death. The interviewees also gave a number of the techniques they employ to reduce the number of patient falls and injuries related to these falls. Some of the techniques listed include: putting up printed signs labeled, “call before you fall” besides the patients’ beds; increasing the number of bed alarms, and doing hourly patient rounding.

In conclusion, I can to the realization that all nurses, despite their different titles and scope of practice, focus on similar issues, chief among them being championing the patients’ needs (Bolton, 2010).