Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective
Students must maintain weekly reflective narratives throughout the course to combine into one course-long reflective journal that integrates leadership and inquiry into current practice as it applies to the Professional Capstone and Practicum course.
In your journal, you will reflect on the personal knowledge and skills gained throughout this course. The journal should address a variable combination of the following, depending on your specific practice immersion clinical experiences:
1. New practice approaches
2.Intraprofessional collaboration
3. Healthcare delivery and clinical systems
4. Ethical considerations in healthcare
5. Population health concerns
6. The role of technology in improving healthcare outcomes
7. Health policy
8. Leadership and economic models
9. Health disparities
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Students will outline what they have discovered about their professional practice, personal strengths and weaknesses that surfaced, additional resources and abilities that could be introduced to a given situation to influence optimal outcomes, and finally, how the student met the competencies aligned to this course. Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective. While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and in-text citations and references should be presented using APA documentation guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide located in the Student Success Center.
Week 1: New practice approaches
This was the first week, marking an introductory phase to the material we would cover for the rest of the semester. Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective. In fact, it focused on the concept of evidence-based practice. In this case, the material presented for the week allowed me to develop an appreciation for the assessment skills and knowledge nurses apply in clinical practice. At the core of the information presented for the course is an emphasis on the nurses’ role in reasoning about diagnostics, aligning thoughts with evidence, reducing risk factors, and promoting health. The week’s material taught me strategies for adapting nursing techniques and questions when faced with challenging communication situations, particularly when the patient experiences time-based changes or the patient’s response is unanticipated. Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective. Overall, I understand that the unique and unexpected features of the healthcare environment can help me analyze and apply nursing notions even as I am prepared to practice effectively in any medical care environment. Besides that, the week’s content allowed me to appreciate how evidence can reinforce the right features of objective and subjective information collection and the variations needed for different cultures, age groups, and problems (Jensen, 2014).
Week 2: Intraprofessional collaboration
The content for week 2 gave me a new appreciation for intraprofessional collaboration. In fact, I learned that it is important to maintain collaborative relationships with my nursing colleagues since exchanging information would allow me to understand better disease transmission and the appropriate safety precaution Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective. First was understanding collaboration as a multifaceted progression that uses shared responsibility, individual responsiveness, and effective communication to ensure that patients receive the best possible nursing care. In essence, effectively collaborating between nurses requires that each nurse concede that individual work achieves less than teamwork. Effective collaboration is guaranteed to offer quality when presenting patient care. Nurses can improve professional performance through interprofessional collaboration, including innovation, shared responsibility, and coordination. Also, it reduces tardiness and absenteeism rates. Additionally, it improves decision-making, individual performance, and nurses’ satisfaction. Besides that, it improves the quality of healthcare. An important aspect of the week’s material was the connotation that intraprofessional collaboration is be
st achieved through suppressed dissension, threats being used coercively, emotional support, and sharing knowledge and tasks as tactics (Shohani et al., 2017).
Week 3. Healthcare delivery and clinical systems
Attending the classes for week 3 allowed me to gain a better appreciation of clinical systems. It first presented material on the dynamics affecting nursing practice. Next, the content identified the main challenges affecting nursing care delivery. This was followed by a tally of the different settings where patients can receive nursing care. The different types of patient populations were then distinguished. It distinguished the concepts of nursing certification, accreditation, and licensure, as well as the functions of nursing agencies. Finally, it identified and described nursing associations and organizations (Wessel & Manthey, 2015). At the conclusion of this week’s material, I understood that nursing care delivery systems are complex, with facets dependent on input from different stakeholders.
Week 4. Ethical considerations in health care
This week’s content acknowledged that nurses struggle with ethical challenges in their professional duties. Centrality, communication, and confidentiality when providing care are at the core of this struggle. In fact, nurses are expected to uphold foundational ethical principles, duties, and virtues. Despite this awareness, the unimpressive reality is that nursing personnel increasingly struggle to practice with integration since they face complex ethical pressures and choices. In essence, nursing personnel can face profound ethical questions of wrong and right to underlying beneficent care provision and decision-making (Scott, 2017). Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective. For instance, as a nursing practitioner, I question the balance between the value of preserving the life of a patient requiring palliative care versus using aggressive physiological approaches to prolong the patient’s anguish while not yielding any meaningful results in terms of providing a cure. The week’s made it clear that each ethical choice scenario is unique, and the same choice will have different implications for two situations. Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective
Week 5. Population health concerns
The lecture material presented population health, focusing on populations with similar characteristics and medical care concerns. In fact, it presents the results of evaluating the needs of the whole community, addressing these needs as broad health determinants while considering multiple levels of nursing practice. In this case, the practice levels refer to the individual, community, and system. The individual includes the family as the smallest population unit, focusing on altering behavior, practice, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge for the best outcomes. The community focuses on behaviors, practices, awareness, attitudes, and norms inherent within the community and affect health. The system focuses on power structures, laws, policies, regulations, and organizations that impact health (Holzemer & Klainberg, 2014). As a nursing practitioner, I am expected to determine an appropriate practice level to address an existing health problem, then develop effective nursing strategies for that level before assigning resources to the selected strategies.
Week 6. The role of technology in improving health care outcomes
The course material identified technology as being very beneficial to healthcare outcomes. In fact, it is impossible to appreciate technology’s role without reflecting on how much care provision has changed over the years. Technological advances have improved public engagement and communication for medical facilities and organizations. For nursing personnel and other medical professionals, it has improved information assessment and records sharing, although it raises issues about how information access is governed. For patients and other public members, technological advances have offered them tools that facilitate health management through peer support, advice, information acquisition, and support arrangements. Despite technology’s role in improving healthcare outcomes for different stakeholders, it has also introduced some challenges, including cultural change, technical integration, scalability, and financial pressure (Davis & LaCour, 2014). Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective.
Week 7. Health policy
Health policy is presented as a tool for shaping the provision of nursing care. In this case, nurses are presented as persons who have close contact with the patients they serve, thus allowing them to understand their patient’s health care needs better. For that matter, nurses are able to speak on behalf of their patients, acting as a logical option for leading the way when setting priorities for health policies. This justifies nurses’ involvement in policy development since they are positioned to offer important information due to their proximity and interaction with patients, their families, and other community members (Porche, 2017). Through attending this week’s material on health policy, I now understand the opportunities available to me to influence health policies and even translate research into policy implementation.
Week 8. Leadership and economic models
This week’s material conceded that there is limited awareness of nurses’ contribution (potential or significance) to health care through profession, science, policy, and practice. Reviewing the material taught me that investment in nursing can present economic, social, and clinical returns. Still, the returns can only be achieved if nurses are involved at the leadership level, other only some of these returns would be achieved (Shamian & Ellen, 2016). As such, as a nursing practitioner, I should encourage investment in nursing to include assigning leadership roles as a tool for improving care outcomes.
Week 9. Health disparities
The material presented this week mentioned that prejudice exists in healthcare delivery. In fact, data on health disparities should that mortality rates for preventable issues such as drugs, car accidents, suicide, premature births, and chronic ailments were higher for certain population demographics such as marginalized communities. To reverse the reality of health disparities, nurses must be part of developing a solution since they are privileged to interact with their patients and community intimately. In essence, nurses must be ready to address the quality of human life by treating everyone with attention and equally. Ultimately, my understanding of the content is that every person deserves to receive the same nursing care, and anything less than equality would be unethical (Wesley, 2011).
Conclusion
The nine units I attended have advanced my knowledge of the nursing practice. In fact, they have turned me into a more proficient nurse capable of offering the best possible nursing care. Still, I believe some of the material was only covered shallowly and should be expounded on in more detail. That is to say that one week was not enough to cover each unit comprehensively. As such, I would recommend assigning more time to each unit’s coverage.
References
Davis, N. & LaCour, M. (2014). Health information technology (3rd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Holzemer, S. & Klainberg, M. (2014). Community health nursing: an alliance for health (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Jensen, S. (2014). Nursing health assessment: a best practice approach (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Porche, D. (2017). Health policy: application for nurses and other health professionals (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Benchmark – Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal – Obesity Essay Example.
Scott, A. (2017). Key concepts and issues in nursing ethics. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.
Shamian, J. & Ellen, M. (2016). The role of nurses and nurse leaders in realizing the clinical, social, and economic return on investment of nursing care. Health Management Forum, 29(3), 99-103.
Shohani, M., Valizadeh, L., Zamanzadeh, V. & Dougherty, M. (2017). Effective individual contributions on Iranian nurses intraprofessional collaboration process: a qualitative study. Journal of Caring Sciences, 6(3), 213-220. doi 10.15171/JCS.2017.021 Benchmark – Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal – Obesity Essay Example.
Wesley, Y. (2011). Leadership and healthcare disparities. Nursing Management, 42(8), 40-45.
Wessel, S. & Manthey, M. (2015). Primary nursing: person-centered care delivery system design. Minneapolis, MN: Creative Health Care Management. Benchmark – Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal – Obesity Essay Example.