Essay Example on Nursing Professionalism: An Inter-Professional and Intra-Professional Career

In nursing, professionalism encompasses more than one level of performance and excellence. Nursing as a professional field covers many aspects of medical practice and patient care as a separate entity to medicine in general. According to Avlijas (2019), the nursing profession is an inter-profession and intra-professional career. It operates as a multifunctional discipline as it acts as an ancillary career in medicine and patient care. In retrospect, this essay presents a discussion on the fundamentals of nursing as a profession.

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Nursing professionalism has developed through various barriers to develop its scope and ethical principles. According to García-Moyano et al. (2019), initially, people considered the profession as a female career. However, the level of training and professional certification has proved otherwise. Besides, since the early 1980s, new approaches to knowledge development in nursing professionalism have led to new and advanced options to teach and practice nursing. García-Moyano et al., (2019) note that those new approaches include evidence-based approaches and the incorporation of technology in practice. In this regard, the current body of knowledge focuses on the possible concepts that could be applied to expand the discipline into a more inclusive and patient-centered field.

Until recently, the nursing profession has been regulated as a sub-section of the medical profession. These regulations have helped to improve the working environments, ensure nurses operate as patient advocates, and deliver justice to their clients. But more importantly, nursing professionalism gets guided by the principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, and justice in solving professional and ethical dilemmas that arise in the workplace (Avlijas, 2019). Most of the modern nursing curriculum focuses on patient-centered mechanisms of healing. These mechanisms embody a holistic and inclusive approach to enhancing patient safety.

Moreover, nursing professionalism caters to patients pre-treatment and post-treatment. In these circumstances, different types of patient handling are necessary. In traditional nursing, the same kind of care was recommended whether the patient was undergoing treatment or not (Ghadirian et al., 2014). Avlijas (2019) observes that these methods of care used to expose the patients to high risks of infection from the hospital environments and were not flexible enough to meet the needs of individual patients. However, today, the use of evidence-based approaches and professional code of conduct, greater focus goes to patient safety, positive outcomes and prevention of diseases.

Conclusion

In conclusion, nursing professionalism is a necessity in both medicine and patient care science. In most modern studies, recommendations to recognize nursing as a fully-fledged profession emerges out of the need to study the advanced concepts of patient care and safety as well as improve the quality of service delivery in care facilities. Today, nursing professionalism revolves around evidence-based practice and the principles of nursing as a way of improving patient and health outcomes.

References

Avlijas, T. (2019). A Concept Analysis of the Patient Experience in Acute Care. University of Ottawa.

García-Moyano, L., Altisent, R., Pellicer-García, B., Guerrero-Portillo, S., Arrazola-Alberdi, O., & Delgado-Marroquin, M. T. (2019). A concept analysis of professional commitment in nursing. Nursing ethics, 26(3), 778-797. doi: 10.1177/0969733017720847

Ghadirian, F., Salsali, M., & Cheraghi, M. A. (2014). Nursing professionalism: An evolutionary concept analysis. Iranian journal of nursing and midwifery research, 19(1), 1-10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917177/