Preparing Your Reflection
The BSN Essentials (AACN, 2008) outline a number of healthcare policy and advocacy competencies for the BSN-prepared nurse. Reflect on the NUR3125 course readings, discussion threads, and applications you have completed across this course and write a reflective essay regarding the extent to which you feel you are now prepared to:
1. “Demonstrate the professional standards of moral, ethical, and legal conduct.
2. Assume accountability for personal and professional behaviors.
3. Promote the image of nursing by modeling the values and articulating the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the nursing profession.
4. Demonstrate professionalism, including attention to appearance, demeanor, respect for self and others, and attention to professional boundaries with patients and families as well as among caregivers.
5. Demonstrate an appreciation of the history of and contemporary issues in nursing and their impact on current nursing practice.
6. Reflect on one’s own beliefs and values as they relate to professional practice.
7. Identify personal, professional, and environmental risks that impact personal and professional choices, and behaviors.
8. Communicate to the healthcare team one’s personal bias on difficult healthcare decisions that impact one’s ability to provide care.
9. Recognize the impact of attitudes, values, and expectations on the care of the very young, frail older adults, and other vulnerable populations.
10. Protect patient privacy and confidentiality of patient records and other privileged communications.
11. Access interprofessional and intra-professional resources to resolve ethical and other practice dilemmas.
12. Act to prevent unsafe, illegal, or unethical care practices.
13. Articulate the value of pursuing practice excellence, lifelong learning, and professional engagement to foster professional growth and development.
14. Recognize the relationship between personal health, self-renewal, and the ability to deliver sustained quality care.
15. Conduct comprehensive and focused physical, behavioral, psychological, spiritual, socioeconomic, and environmental assessments of health and illness parameters in patients, using developmentally and culturally appropriate approaches.
16. Recognize the relationship of genetics and genomics to health, prevention, screening, diagnostics, prognostics, selection of treatment, and monitoring of treatment effectiveness, using a constructed pedigree from collected family history information as well as standardized symbols and terminology.
17. Implement holistic, patient centered care that reflects an understanding of human growth and development, pathophysiology, pharmacology, medical management, and nursing management across the health illness continuum, across the lifespan, and in all healthcare settings.
18. Communicate effectively with all members of the healthcare team, including the patient and the patient’s support network.
19. Deliver compassionate, patient centered, evidence-based care that respects patient and family preferences.
20. Implement patient and family care around resolution of end of life and palliative care issues, such as symptom management, support of rituals, and respect for patient and family preferences.
21. Provide appropriate patient teaching that reflects developmental stage, age, culture, spirituality, patient preferences, and health literacy considerations to foster patient engagement in their care.
22. Implement evidence-based nursing interventions as appropriate for managing the acute and chronic care of patients and promoting health across the lifespan.
23. Monitor client outcomes to evaluate the effectiveness of psychobiological interventions.
24. Facilitate patient centered transitions of care, including discharge planning and ensuring the caregiver’s knowledge of care requirements to promote safe care.
25. Provide nursing care based on evidence that contributes to safe and high-quality patient outcomes within healthcare microsystems.
26. Create a safe care environment that results in high quality patient outcomes.
27. Revise the plan of care based on an ongoing evaluation of patient outcomes.
28. Demonstrate clinical judgment and accountability for patient outcomes when delegating to and supervising other members of the healthcare team.
29. Manage care to maximize health, independence, and quality of life for a group of individuals that approximates a beginning practitioner’s workload
30. Demonstrate the application of psychomotor skills for the efficient, safe, and compassionate delivery of patient care.
31. Develop a beginning understanding of complementary and alternative modalities and their role in health care.
32. Develop an awareness of patients as well as healthcare professionals’ spiritual beliefs and values and how those beliefs and values impact health care.
33. Manage the interaction of multiple functional problems affecting patients across the lifespan, including common geriatric syndromes.
34. Understand one’s role and participation in emergency preparedness and disaster response with an awareness of environmental factors and the risks they pose to self and patients
35. Engage in caring and healing techniques that promote a therapeutic nurse patient relationship.
36. Demonstrate tolerance for the ambiguity and unpredictability of the world and its effect on the healthcare system as related to nursing practice.” (pp. 28, 31-32).
