Essentials VII-IX in healthcare
Essential VII: Clinical Prevention and Population Health
This essential deals with promoting health and ensuring maximum protection against any diseases and injuries at both the individual patient level and the population level. According to AACN (2008), genetic factors, lifestyle, and environmental factors are the leading factors affecting population health. Therefore, over-reliance on acute care and disease-based interventions are not enough to guarantee population health. There is a need for the inclusion of disease and injury prevention to ensure population health. This dynamic nature of health care has influenced the design of the nursing curriculum in several ways. First is the inclusion of the Disaster Management course in nursing programs. In the disaster management course, I learned the basics of delivering healthcare services to a large population in the case of an emergency. The course also provided me with the necessary information regarding injury prevention to those close to the emergency. Through this course, I was able to gain relevant information regarding helping individuals, groups, and communities in reducing health consequences and mass casualties during emergencies (Zaccagnini, & Pechacek, 2019).
I also met this essential during the Public Health course. The course provides vital information regarding population-based care by emphasizing health promotion and disease prevention. Activities included in the population-based care include putting a priority on primary prevention, community outreach to get to those who might benefit from the practice, and channeling available resources to ensure overall population health (Zaccagnini, & Pechacek, 2019). For example, reaching out to the remote communities and educating them about screening for common chronic diseases. Due to the requirement for population-based care and a baccalaureate degree in nursing, I volunteered to work at the Kindred Hospital Las Vegas Flamingo Subacute Unit to expand my knowledge. Here, I met this essential through community outreach. During my volunteer outreach, the healthcare facility held a community outreach where we provided healthcare services such as screenings, diagnosis, and treatment of common health conditions. I was also involved in a seminar ant the end of the community outreach program where we held teaching sessions and informed the general public about the simple ways through which the community may prevent common health conditions and improve on the general health of the population (Zaccagnini, & Pechacek, 2019).
Essential VIII: Professionalism and Professional Values
This essential deals with ensuring professionalism in nursing practice. Professionalism in nursing involves a set of values that nurses are expected to hold and which include the methods, standards, and decisions that nurses have to make daily. To maintain professionalism, the nurse needs to keep traits such as caring, ethics, communication, and accountability (AACN, 2008). In nursing, professionalism goes hand in hand with civility, which is a set of essential behaviors that a nurse must observe. In addition to that, professionalism in nursing involves integrating evidence-based activities with personal knowledge, skills, and sensitivity. In the current world, the patient population has increasingly been diverse, encompassing individuals from different communities, religions, and cultures. Therefore, the nurse must maintain the sensitivity associated with these factors for them to be effective in health care services provision (Dehghani, Salsali, & Cheraghi, 2016). I came across this essential during my volunteer program at the Kindred Hospital Las Vegas Flamingo Subacute Unit. In this facility, patient information is handled with the utmost discretion. One of the features of professionalism in nursing is discretion concerning patient information. During my volunteering program, I learned that even though the organization maintains its records using the EMR system, only a handful of personnel has access to this information. Furthermore, I learned that the organization has a whole IT department whose core duties include developing and maintaining security systems to ensure that patient information is not leaked. The nurses there also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement that makes it illegal for them to share personal patient information with unauthorized persons.
Since the Baccalaureate education system requires us to develop a professional value and value-based behavior, having a clear understanding of health professionals’ values is fundamental in service delivery (AACN, 2008). Furthermore, since Baccalaureate graduates are bound to face several complex situations, professionalism requires them to maintain professional ethics in decision-making. In professionalism, ethics is a fundamental value that entails maintaining respect for patients and maintaining patient advocacy in all practices (Dehghani, Salsali, & Cheraghi, 2016). Other professional values that nurses should keep are human dignity, altruism, integrity, and autonomy.
Essential IX: Baccalaureate Generalist Nursing Practice
This essential relates to practice-focused activities that include combining the skill, knowledge, and attitudes gained through the other essentials with nursing care at the personal or community level. In this essential, the nurse acts as the link between the patient and the sophisticated nature of health care processes (AACN, 2008). To do so, the nurse has to for a personal relationship with the patient. This intimate relationship serves the nurses’ interests in two ways. One is that the nurse can form trust with the patient, which allows them to offer personalized and compassionate care. The other is that it helps the nurse in collecting valuable patient information for use in treatment (Zaccagnini, & Pechacek, 2019). In this essential, the importance of integration of knowledge and skills in nursing practice is identified, and the baccalaureate graduate is expected to use clinical reasoning in patient-centered care to come up with a nursing practice that demonstrates their ethical values.
To be effective in nursing practice, the baccalaureate graduate must acquire essential skills such as health promotion, disease management, communication, and psychomotor skills. Additionally, the nursing practice involves caring for patients across the demographic nature of the population, meaning that the baccalaureate graduate will have to deal with patients of all ages, all forms of medical disorders, and their complexities (Zaccagnini, & Pechacek, 2019). I have come across this essential in several situations. During my intermediate med Surg clinical rotations, I would help my assigned nurse in the initial assessment of patients and patient data collection. This helped me develop my communication and psychomotor skills, which came in handy during my summer volunteering program. During this program, I was able to integrate some of the skills I learned during the intermediate med Surg clinical rotations and implement them in the nursing process.
References
American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). (2008). The essentials of baccalaureate education for professional nursing practice. Retrieved from http://www.aacnnursing.org/portals/42/publications/baccessentials08.pdf
Dehghani, A., Salsali, M., & Cheraghi, M. A. (2016). Professionalism in I Iranian Nursing: Concept Analysis. International journal of nursing knowledge, 27(2), 111-118.
Zaccagnini, M., & Pechacek, J. M. (2019). The doctor of nursing practice essentials: A new model for advanced practice nursing. Jones & Bartlett Learning.