Nursing: Defining A Profession

The Nursing Profession Is A Complicated One.

Part of society deems it honorary, while another views it as workhorse. Still another sector, physicians, oftentimes respond to nursing personnel as though they are invisible, inconsequential creatures. The reality is that the expertise, knowledge, training, and intuition that constitute a good nurse, create an absolutely invaluable, supportive role in medicine and in society. This fact is the focus in this essay.

Nursing credentials come in two forms, the LVN and the RN. Both are licensed. Both have the opportunity to engage and join in one or more of several affiliations that support nursing roles and create opportunities for advancing knowledge and certifications in specific nursing specialties. The LVN requires two years of pre-requisites and 3 following semesters of nursing school. The RN requires two years of prerequisites and 4 following semesters of nursing school. Either profession may continue to BSN or MSN status.

The Unique Qualifications of Nursing

The LVN and RN learn and utilize life-preserving and life-saving skills that progress and sharpen with daily use. Each patient interaction requires moment by moment professional medical judgment to exercise consistent patient care that fosters both health and safety, optimally. No patient, case or shift is ever the same. This reality requires the nurse to be vigilant and up to date in the practise of medical knowledge and skills, such as medication administration/knowledge or the knowledge/practical execution of appropriate interventions and/or triage assessment of/for health-compromising insidious symptoms easily misunderstood, ignored or missed.

Professional positions in a society must meet some important needs of the members of that society. Nursing supplies human beings with preventative healthcare, emergent healthcare and supportive healthcare, which is a most basic biological need of humankind. Most lifelong nurses will agree that to enter the nursing profession is indeed a life purpose and calling. Those who do leave the field usually do not do so without much brooding and conflict, as caring for people is usually interwoven into a nurse’s physical and emotional makeup and is very difficult to break from, professionally and personally.

To be successful in the nursing field, the nurse must always be open to learning about the co-disciplines involved in patient care and in cross-training in new specialties. This gives the nurse opportunity for a deeper understanding of patient perspective and experience, provides the mastering of all skills required to care for and treat diverse patient groups/needs and also increases flexibility for advancement in their career.

The resources available for nurses to continue in and to support their professionalism are Continuing Education Credits, medical seminars, and opportunities to educate patients through pop-up clinics/speaking engagements.

As a nurse hones his/her specialties, they are able to have increased autonomy over their schedules, which provides the freedom and time to focus on their own expression and direction of the profession (such as online courses/blogs/teaching materials), which they have personally designed.

Professionalism Is Actually A State of Mind.

Although not every job is a profession, every employee has the capability to be a professional in moral and in integrity.

Nurses are absolutely required to have the highest integrity and moral values and to carry out those characteristics with every patient they encounter, without a trace of judgmentalism.

Not every person faces a job with conviction or investment in the counterparts, but most nurses do, as the counterparts are people and people are why we do what we do.

I enjoy my profession as a nurse because I have had daily opportunities over the past thirty years to love and care for the precious human beings on this planet.

Professional, committed nurses make the medical world go ‘round.