Reflection Essay On Professional Nursing

Professional Practice Reflection
Professional nursing began with Florence Nightingale began all those years ago in war torn Crimea. The mother of modern nursing used the art of including both the heart and the brain to care for those that crossed her path and took the time to document it, because as we all know, if you did not document it, you did not do it. Nursing is the combination of critical thinking, clinical knowledge, and a caring to positively influence and improve the lives and health of those we come in contact with. A professional nurse always applies the nursing practice in a logical and circular manner to care for his/her patients. What distinguishes the professional nurse from other nurses is the understanding of why nurses do the interventions they do. This knowledge allows for greater autonomy and flexibility in providing care. This may sound broad but nursing practice is broad and to attempt to narrowly define what nursing is would be limiting and a …show more content…
In order to provide the best possible outcomes for all patients, whether the patient is an individual, family, or community, it is important to look at all the factors that caused the problem in the first place, how to correct/heal the issue, and how to keep the disease/issue from occurring again in the future. Nothing occurs in a vacuum, nurses must look both upstream and downstream for both problems and solutions in order to keep patients on the healthy side of the health continuum. If healthcare providers only look at and attempt to fix the obvious problem, we set ourselves up for failure. To provide this holistic care for our patients we must also always be learning. Graduating nursing school is not the end of my education, regardless of whether or not I pursue a formalized higher education, I plan to always chase more knowledge. I know that more knowledge will lead to better outcomes for all those I