Sustainable Nursing Profession

A sustainable professional career represents a career that stands dynamic and flexible. Sustainability, in relation to a nursing career, requires an individual to pursue continuous learning opportunities, while maintaining job security through demonstrating competent skills, values, and morals aligned with the nursing profession. The quality needed for a sustainable professional life that I can relate to stands as seeing the world through the lens of the profession’s moral purposes and standards (Giddens, 2017). As a nursing student, you receive exposure and gather information on nursing morals, values, and ethics through clinical experiences and class work, including reading the Code of Ethics. Although reading about the Code of Ethics provides

I no longer strictly focus on meeting the physical needs of the patients I care for, but rather, I now take a more comprehensive approach to patient care. For example, a standard moral purpose for the nursing profession stands as providing the community with reliable information and resources to make educated decision to promote health and minimize illness. This past week, I spent my clinical immersion providing education to parents, in relation to the care of their newborns. To promote health and minimize illness, I educated parents on SIDS prevention, feeding cues, breastfeeding, jaundice, immunizations, blood glucose levels, developmental needs, and appropriate counts of intake and output (Dirty and wet diapers). The realization that I go into patient care situations with a more comprehensive approach stands important as patients are not straight forward; each patient entails varying levels of physical, emotional, and social needs that must be met while in the health care system. While the physical needs may retain the highest priority, an effective nurse will take all aspects of a patient’s needs into consideration when creating care plans. To best care for our patients, we must comprehensively acknowledge and seek to meet their

Following the nursing purpose of promoting health and minimizing illness, sustainability in professional nursing practice requires that clinical decisions not only focus on current health care issues, but also on potential and expected consequences of illness (Riedel, 2016). This article relates back to my clinical example of providing newborn patient education to parents by directly correlating to the values of professional responsibility and patient quality of life. Although the newborn, and their parents, leave the health care system in a positive state, complications may transpire in the home setting if proper education is not provided. It is the nurse’s responsibility to listen to patient’s concerns, appropriately answer questions, and provide education on what to expect with transitioning from the hospital setting to the home