My journey throughout the baccalaureate Nursing Program has provided a completely different perspective of the professional role of nursing. After being accustomed to studying the medical aspect of nursing, there is a different insight to nursing leadership and community advocacy. There is a reason why nursing is called the “science of caring”: it incorporates how a professional cares for clients’ medical needs with dignity and grace.
In this course, students explore professional nursing issues evident in todays’ and future practice. Rather than simply identifying career challenges, students explore how these issues require awareness supported with evidence. Throughout the semester, students begin to discover the issues they were passionate about as different discussions were prompted. First, students were asked to develop a personal nursing philosophy in order for students to reflect their thoughts of why nursing matters. Students were assigned with weekly discussion board questions for various professional issues of nursing. Debate teams were created to understand the different sides of sensitive topics in nursing. Finally, students were assigned to develop an extensive research paper on a particular issue that is of importance to them. In my experience, developing the term paper was an insightful assignment because I found a professional nursing issue that was important to my practice: the rising occurrence of medical errors. After completing research, I was more shocked to see how it is not seen as concerning as it should be. This will be something I will carry throughout my career and I want to continue advocating safe medication administration as this is a crucial part of our nursing profession.
Professional Nursing Issues is one of the courses that provided a different perspective of nursing that allowed me to continue my growth. While I understood the importance of obtaining a baccalaureate degree, these courses only provided more reasons for every nurse to continue their education throughout their career.
