Nursing: reflective journal
Introduction
In the modern health care sector, nurses always work in an environment that is characterized or associated with multiple complexities and challenges. The practical experiences and knowledge that I gained have given me the opportunity for overcoming the complexities and challenges of the health care system so as to be able to deliver quality services to not only patients but also to disadvantaged populations. As a result of that, the experience I have acquired whilst handling patients from different ethnicities have given me an opportunity for sharpening my leadership and professional skills. As a baccalaureate nurse who anticipates or desires to work within different settings, I cannot afford to depend only on my proficiency in training, or immature optimism associated with cooperation and collaboration. Consequently, my teaching and practical experiences have assisted me in improving my potential to execute leadership skills and knowledge as well as participate appropriately in delivering efficient health care services to patients and vulnerable populations. Lastly, I managed to learn and master the context of the modern and continuously evolving health care system.
New practice approaches
For decades that have passed, the nursing field has encountered multiple changes. As a result of that, I have managed to learn how to adapt to such changes so as to remain significant in providing excellent health care services to all patients. For example, in the process of continuing utilizing nursing evidence-based practice has greatly assisted me in handling various problems such as obesity, heart attack, asthma, and diabetes. Despite that, what I came to realize is the fact that such principles or standards have not been embraced adequately in the delivery of health care services. Within the conventional healthcare environments, patient safety researches have extensively emphasized the need of evaluating records for the purpose of assessing patient safety problems and other related issues. The idea behind that is to aid in demonstrating the fact that modern health care practices have the potential of enhancing patient safety and the quality of the services being provided (Borbasi et al., 2019). Ideally, I have managed to learn the fact that nursing is one of the fields that are rich with evolving practices that advocate the utilization of experimental or empirical studies. Currently, the nursing field has extensively provided outstanding leadership for health care improvement via the use of research findings.
Nevertheless, the utilization of nursing evidence-based practices has transformed healthcare institutions in several ways. A large percentage of the higher learning institutions have continued to recognize the importance of the recent health care trends through the introduction of various changes in the nursing programs being offered so as to take into consideration evidence-based practices. For learners pursuing a nursing degree, accessing course material that focuses on improving nursing knowledge is ultimately important. These initiatives mainly emphasize on the importance of nurses making informed decisions that can aid in promoting the understanding of the spiritual, ethical, and clinical background of the patients. Furthermore, the continued uses of nursing evidence-based practices have resulted in the refurbishment of nursing studies. Due to the fact that nursing programs might consist of numerous courses related to research, it is the learner's responsibility to ensure that he or she has identified the importance of improving his or her skills (Craig & Dowding, 2019). Although I have realized that conducting research cannot be a habitual endeavor, it is vital to comprehend issues or problems that are pertinent to modern scientific evidence. The reason for that is because such pertinent issues are likely to provide outstanding impacts both on the present and forthcoming career development..
Inter-professional collaboration
In the modern healthcare industry, health care duties have been perceived to be burdensome, multifaceted, and complex for a single physician to accomplish. Ideally, a single issue may demand the input of several professionals obtained from diverse specialties. I can testify that this is the most interesting experiences that I have learned or observed. The duty of the nursing profession is to induce change as well as advance health care delivery. As a result of that, it is the responsibility of a nurse to understand the fact that a single person cannot have the ability to perform or execute all of these tasks. More importantly, I have managed to learn the fact that inter-professional collaboration moves away from an empirical healthcare environment to the extent of including edification contexts. The modern healthcare environments require sophisticated or chronological organizational systems that rely on not only interrelationship but also on the integration of different services provided by various healthcare providers (Institute of Medicine (U.S.), 2015). Usually, each of these health care providers has their areas of emphasis and professionalism.
Additionally, inter-professional collaboration is important in successfully solving problems such as medicine and technological improvement, broadening the demand for modernized healthcare services, reduced healthcare resources, and so on. Nurses also work in the same context in which professional cooperation occurs in fostering the need for understanding the needs of the patients as well as providing health care system-wide activities and procedures. Similarly, inter-professional collaboration is important both within major and small health care organizations. In a healthcare environment that emphasizes the importance of increasing the demand for accountability and transparency, it is the duty of nurses to ensure that they have accessed the extent or level of the health care standards that they provide. In the modern competitive and problematic world, the survival of any patient requires that the performance of healthcare organizations should display the highest health care standards with incurring high medical expenses (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2013). Last but not least, inter-professional collaboration has the potential of improving the likelihood that better health care standards can be effectively achieved irrespective of the nature of teams and expenses that aid in addressing health issues.
Ethical consideration in healthcare
According to research, nurses do encounter difficulties when addressing ethical issues associated with health care delivery to patients. Because of that, ethical issues and problems might evolve inside any healthcare situation in which deeper moral considerations ought to be taken into account. Therefore, in the nursing profession, I had the opportunity of learning the significance of comprehending the ethical culture and climate of the healthcare circumstance that I was working at. Ideally, ethical culture takes into account how ethical matters and other related circumstances that lead to ethical concerns or issues are handled within a healthcare institution. In the field of nursing, ethical practices can be established by seeking guidance from ethical professionals. These professionals play a crucial role in the establishment of ethical codes that consists of recommendations and guidelines that can be utilized for the purpose of responding to ethical issues or problems.
Whenever an ethical problem evolves, it is imperative to respond to an efficient ethical climate that aid in integrating workers’ opinions on how ethical concerns are discussed, handled, and/or addressed. In the nursing field, a nurse takes a collective and individual responsibility to develop, maintain, as well as improve their ethical environments or settings of the empirical conditions and contexts of recruitment that are extremely supportive in securing high standards of health care (Parris et al., 2015). It is this responsibility that allows nurses to have the opportunity for upholding the importance of ethical environments in which nursing ethical practices are required in realizing the needs and preferences of the patients and their families.
Health disparities
Although nurses have the responsibility of ensuring that health care services can be easily accessed by all patients, the general advancement of health equity programs has been encountering numerous challenges. For example, people have been facing racial-based disparities in the process of trying to access health care services. As a result of that two main approaches can be utilized for the purpose of reducing disparities in the access and/or provision of health care services. In most cases, health care disparities evolve whenever a particular group of people has the opportunity of enjoying access to better health care services than others. Such a situation often highlights differences in the rate of deaths amongst various populations. Usually, health care disparities are contributed by income inequalities amongst people. For example, middles class individuals might encounter difficulties in obtaining efficient health care services as compared to high-class individuals. Therefore, by using the selection process, nurses can assist in investigating as well as examining health disparities between groups of people. This process can be regarded as being the tendency of grouping individuals according to their social gatherings, residential places, and soon (Barr, 2019). For example, people who like participating in physical exercises will most probably live in regions where they can access facilities like the gym while those individuals who like staying indoors or isolating themselves often opt to reside in auto-reliant regions.
On the other hand, such a scenario plays a crucial role in understanding the health differences amongst individuals who belong to different income levels. For example, individuals who wealthy and live sedentary or inactive lifestyles are probable to be troubled with health issues such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases, unlike those living poor homesteads who engage in tedious activities like long-distance walking. Such a scenario in particular circumstances is regarded as being a justification for ethnic, professional, or academic discrepancies in health. This advocates why the majority of intellectuals or scholars and individuals with high socioeconomic standards are healthier. Despite that, my opinion is that various environmental factors play a considerable role in escalating health disparities in a particular country (Weinstein et al., 2017). That can be based on the compositional and contextual impacts that exist. Compositional factors or issues typically represent the characteristics of the society in terms of the environment they thrive in while contextual factors often impact neighborhoods. For example, when specialized healthcare organizations end up attracting a large percentage of chronologically sick patients from a certain neighborhood, their health situations as compared to intermediate neighborhoods can be considered to be compositional.
References
Barr, D. A. (2019). Health disparities in the United States: Social class, race, ethnicity, and the social determinants of health. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press
Borbasi, S., Jackson, D., & East, L. (2019). Navigating the Maze of Research: Enhancing Nursing and Midwifery Practice. Amsterdam : Elsevier Press
In Craig, J. V., & In Dowding, D. (2019). Evidence-based practice in nursing. Amsterdam : Elsevier Press
Institute of Medicine (U.S.). (2015). Measuring the impact of interprofessional education on collaborative practice and patient outcomes. Washington, D.C. : National Academies Press
Institute of Medicine (U.S.)., Cuff, P. A., Institute of Medicine (U.S.)., Institute of Medicine (U.S.), & National Research Council (U.S.). (2013). Interprofessional education for collaboration: Learning how to improve health from interprofessional models across the continuum of education to practice : workshop summary. Washington, D.C. : The National Academies Press
Parris, K., Zuccarini, M., Mirr, J. M. P., & Blair, K. A. (2015). Advanced practice nursing: Core concepts for professional role development. New York, New York: Springer Publishing Company.
Weinstein, J. N., Geller, A., Negussie, Y., Baciu, A., & National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (U.S.). (2017). Communities in action: Pathways to health equity. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
