NR-500 Week 3 Discussion Topic, Knowing Self (Three Versions)

NR-500 Week 3 Discussion Topic, Knowing Self (Three Versions) Reflect the concepts addressed in this week's lesson plan and required reading. Recall a challenging experience in either your personal or professional life. In the initial response, start with an introduction that includes a brief description of two core values that influence your nursing practice and interaction with others. Provide a concise description of the challenging experience. What core values were challenged in this experience? What lessons were learned from this experience? How did the experience inform future professional behaviors, decisions, and actions? Provide a specific example on how lessons learned from the challenging experience were applied in your professional practice. Use at least one outside scholarly reference to support your position. Professor, Two core values that influence my nursing practice are: honesty and self-awareness. I feel both values are essential to the nursing practice. In order to be successful in one’s nursing practice you must be honest to your patients. You must tell them the truth, even though the truth can hurt. According to Tallo (2016), “For nursing to continue to be respected as a professional discipline it is essential that all nurses are an embodiment of the duty of candour, which means they must be open and honest about their practice, not only with their colleagues, employers and professional bodies, but also with their patients” (p. 26). I feel that maintaining a sense of transparency and honesty is the best way to establish a trusting relationship with your patients, and from this you can build on your presence as being accountable and dependable as a healthcare professional. I also believe that being self-aware is essential to nursing practice. As defined by Rasheed (2015), “self-awareness is the continuous process of understanding and knowing of one's own identity, beliefs, thoughts, traits, motivations, feeling and behavior and to recognize how they affect others in different ways” (p.212). At my very first job as a Registered Nurse, my preceptor was a female nurse who had been practicing for about 15 years. She was a very good nurse: she was highly skilled, quick thinking, and, in the event of an emergency, she is one of the nurses that I would definitely want by my side. However, she was completely self-absorbed and severely lacked self-awareness. She would spend her shifts, talking about herself, her family, her personal wealth, with such a tone of delusion and grandeur that you could tell her patients, and fellow co-workers, were tired of hearing her. She was also very quick to voice her personal opinions to her patients and talk down about the skills of the resident physicians and the younger nurses on staff. In one instance, while I was still in my orientation period, this nurse and I were caring for a patient who had long-standing infertility issues and this newborn was their “miracle baby.” They were incredibly open in sharing how it took them 6 years and thousands of dollars in infertility treatment before they finally conceived. As someone who also shares infertility issues, I was sympathetic to the patient and shared in their joy of finally becoming a family of three. My nurse preceptor was incredibly vocal as to how easy it was for her and her husband to conceive their child and how infertility treatment was questionable because if you could not conceive naturally, then maybe you should not be conceiving at all. While hearing this was immensely painful and insulting to myself, I could tell from the look on our patient’s face that she was both hurt and annoyed by my nurse preceptor’s comments. Our patient’s facial expression, however, did not resonate at all with my nurse preceptor as she continued to verbalize her personal thoughts on infertility treatment in the hallway walking back to the nurses’ station. I have carried this moment with me throughout my nursing career. I learned that while maintaining honesty with our patient’s is vital, there is a large difference between being honest and being obnoxious. To be so vocal about one’s personal opinions is completely lacking in self-awareness and, in this situation, our patient was forced into a lecture she did not ask for. Our opinions hold great value to our patients. We are the gateway of communication to their physician provider and that holds a significant meaning. We must realize the importance of the roles we hold and act to uphold that responsibility. References Rasheed, S. P. (2015). REVIEW PAPER. Self-Awareness as a Therapeutic Tool for Nurse/Client Relationship. International Journal Of Caring Sciences, 8(1), 211. Tallo, D. (2016). Honesty is the best policy. Journal Of Community Nursing, 30(6), 26. RESPONSE 1 Sarah, I admire you for sharing with us such a sensitive personal experience, thank you. I can completely sympathize to your situation as we had a similar situation on our High-Risk Perinatal (HRP) unit. A female patient, in her mid-20’s, and approximately 27-weeks gestation was found unresponsive, lying on a street corner, in our downtown area from overdosing on heroin. She was fortunately found in time and was recovered to stable condition by our Emergency Room. However, because she was pregnant, she was disqualified from the ICU and was sent to our HRP unit to be a long-term patient until she delivered. On her third night of her stay, I was the charge nurse for the Mother/Baby unit and received a panicked phone call from the HRP charge nurse requesting help to call security. Apparently: the phlebotomist had entered the patient’s room in the early hours of the morning, to draw routine bloodwork, only to find that the patient had taken 4 drinking straws, taped them together with IV tape, and used the sticky side of the tape as a make-shift fishing pole and was using anything and everything in the sharps container to self-administer through her IV port. It was an eye-opening experience for all of us nurses working in Women’s Health that day. As providers we want to build trusting relationships with our patients but sometimes that relationship development must become a secondary priority to maintaining benefice. Our patients come to us in their lowest state and we must prioritize maintaining a vigilant eye to every detail in their care. As a nurse, I’m sure you would agree that I would rather do the right thing for my patient, even though they may not necessarily like me for it, than let them have complete independence and hurt themselves further. Great posting, thank you for sharing. RESPONSE 2 Danielle, I completely agree that one of the most important nursing values is integrity. As nurses, we should not only take pride in the care we are able to give our patients but also in the skills we possess. Sometimes I forget to give credit where credit is due to myself and my other co-worker nurses for their skills, for their endurance, for everything that comes in the job description that we forget on a daily basis. You deserve credit for doing the right thing and maintain your integrity in the situation you provided. It is often harder to do the right thing, than to do nothing at all. I commend you for your honesty and integrity. In our society, today, I feel like those values are now seldom found. It is important as healthcare providers and professional that we do not lose sight of our goals: to put our patients first and to provide them with the best care we are capable of. Thank you for sharing. RESPONSE 3: What actions can you implement to support ongoing engagement in cultural humility? Professor, Having cultural humility starts in the home. It is a learned behavior that can often be difficult to correct. As humans we can assume that we will not get along with everyone we meet, so asking for others to be inclusive of others differences in culture can be as equally difficult. However, I believe that it begins with education. We can offer unit in-services directed towards what we can expect from the various cultures in our patient population. For example, on the unit that I work on, once a month one of attending OB/GYN physicians comes to speak at the staff meeting covering “hot topics.” It would be an excellent way to disseminate information to the whole unit and be able to incorporate cultural competency in our daily nursing skills. If we make certain language and verbiage common, we can convey to our patients that being different is “okay,” in fact to be expected, and we can accommodate for that. Being inclusive of all the various cultures will not only encourage your facility to be the facility of choice within your patient population but will also normalize the stigma of being different viewed as abnormal.