My entry into the Nursing School meant that I had to revise some of my learning paradigms to those that fostered lifelong knowledge acquisition. This is founded on the fact that the changes experienced in the recent decades on the professional practice displayed the increasing relevance of the supportive forms of learning in ensuring that competencies that go beyond the specific subject area’s knowledge have been acquired (Longhurst et al. 2020). Due to this, I confidently can state that the culture of teaching within the schools of nursing has changed from the simple transfer of summed up knowledge to the stimulation of students to ensure that they develop both the synthesis and analysis capacities that enhance critical thinking, teamwork, and the ability to communicatively collaborate.
Based on the course learning, students could acknowledge that competency in nursing includes a summation of skills, attitudes, and knowledge about the complex processes through which the modern-day RN professionals found their decisions (Longhurst et al. 2020). These can also be stated as the elements that allow activities of nursing to be performed across all contexts. They can be stated to imply that the nursing profession does not only necessitate one to put knowledge, skills, and appropriate behavioral characteristics into practice in a quest to solve health problems. It rather requires know-how that is structured in three primary dimensions. These include the critical thinking dimension also regarded as the conceptual dimension. The dimension that considers values and attitudes of individuals otherwise stated as the interpersonal dimension (Longhurst et al. 2020). And finally, the dimension that considers technical skills. These competencies can be summarised in terms of the need for nursing professionals to display responsibility towards themselves, patients, the interdisciplinary health teams, the profession, and the general society.
Within the practice of care, the course learning has led to an understanding that nurses must show the capacity to think critically for them to choose the most appropriate actions in solving a health problem. This means that the individuals need to learn how to reason in the same way as he or she will reason as a professional.
Strengths and Weaknesses
While the course has significantly enhanced my knowledge of the profession and what is required for one to emerge as effective nursing professional. While I may have displayed several strengths in my learning, I also had several deficiencies. Before listing down the issues, it is important to highlight that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected nursing students alongside those of other professions across the globe. The detriments pertained to the ability to access the tutors and also some of the necessary learning resources. For the nursing course to successfully be completed, students are required to undergo practical programs within the actual clinical settings. Due to the prevalence of the pandemic, such an obligation could not be met. Nevertheless, the following were some of my strengths that surfaced when taking the classes.
First, while the pandemic may have affected the class sessions, I was able to maintain up-to-date knowledge regarding the profession and the course learning requirements. This is in addition to ensuring that I maintained appropriate communication with peers and tutors to ensure that a collaborative approach of learning still is facilitated. I also can highlight that I also made an effort to ensure that I promoted my competence in autonomous learning. This simply means that aside from class-based learning, I also ensured that I obtained appropriate learning resources from other sources that would facilitate my private knowledge development. Such a strength can be deduced to have emerged from an intrinsic motivation to obtain sufficient knowledge and the acknowledgment of the significance of focusing on strategies that facilitate the desire to learn.
The weakness I displayed that are worth being highlighted include; I often would find it difficult to manage the time-constrained related to nursing education. This means that while I may have worked to ensure that I autonomously developed knowledge that would foster my learning, COVID-19 made it challenging for me to access the assistive resources. Some of those obtained could only be accessed on a waiting basis a phenomenon that significantly impacted my ability to complete tasks on time.
It also is significant to highlight that due to the inability to take part in the practical sessions due to the prevalence of COVID-19, my learning was impacted due to the lack of practical skills that work to facilitate the adoption of theoretical class-based knowledge. It needs to be understood that as a caregiving profession, a significant portion of the learning requires practical knowledge of disease manifestation and real-world approaches to managing them. Such deficiencies increased my levels of stress whenever I thought about how I will manage the issues that emerge in the actual clinical environment.
Additional Resources
The development of new online resources would have worked to improve my learning. As a response to the prevalence of COVID-19 and the consequent lockdowns, it would suffice to ensure that digitized resources and the platforms of virtual anatomy are developed and made accessible to students. These would have worked to ensure that the currently canceled practical lessons are emulated (Hande, 2014). Other resources that despite being available still are quite insufficient include videos, notes, virtual dissections, and quizzes. These would have worked to further facilitate autonomous learning and the ability of students to address the deficiencies that have manifested due to COVID-19.
The primary skills required to successfully meet the course requirements include technological skills, time management, and collaborative skills (Longhurst et al. 2020). The capacity to use technologies ensures that learning resources are easily accessed and also used in the presentations. To ensure that this requirement has been met, worked alongside well-acknowledged individuals to ensure that the technologies that befit nursing education and related activities of research have been understood (Longhurst et al. 2020). Secondly, time management and collaboration can be stated to exist parallel to one another because to effectively manage my time, I had to employ collaboration and delegation especially when the volume of tasks was significant.
I also can state that through my course learning, I managed to gain knowledge of the significance of ethical values in ensuring that patients are appropriately cared for. As per my understanding, ethical values are conduct guidelines universally accepted to ensure the actions, intentions, and motives of care are appropriate (Östman et al. 2019). They are significant because they ensure dilemmas are recognized, appropriate judgments made, and ensure that services uphold the safety of patients, their autonomy, and also sufficient levels of individual integrity.
The element of patient safety, as acknowledge from the course learning resources, has significantly been enhanced by technological solutions. For example, HIT has enabled nursing professionals to store, retrieve, and also share health care data. As per my current understanding, the complex nature of nursing decision making processes mandate the use of patient data, both historical and current (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017). To ensure that greater specificity has been achieved in the course of providing nursing care, technologies such as HIT have ensured that nurses can easily judge what is required by a patient and what may be detrimental based on the logged medical histories and background information.
Finally, the concept of nurse leadership is worth being highlighted in this reflection. I have grown to acknowledge that nurses are now considered as the most significant elements of the healthcare discipline. This is founded on the fact that the course learning depicts nurses as professionals who significantly contribute to the transformation of the system of healthcare (IOM, 2011). This means that nurse leaders are required to ensure appropriate reforms are made on the system and that the most appropriate practice approaches are employed in the provision of cross-population care.
