Advanced Practice Nursing: Essentials of Role Development, Essay Example

Introduction

Nurses are required to adopt many different policies and procedures as part of the daily routine in order to accomplish the objectives required to treat patients and encourage positive health and wellbeing. This process requires nurses to reflect upon their experiences and to learn from these encounters to improve practice settings and direct patient care. This course has provided an interesting examination into some of the issues that nurses face in the practice environment and how these factors impact the ability to treat patients and promote greater wellbeing. This is a continuous process that requires a delicate balance between a number of areas that include the development of nursing-based initiatives to promote disease prevention and to encourage patients to take all possible steps to improve their health. Nurses play a significant role in this process and may inspire patients to optimize their health through their own actions.

Analysis

Nurses are instrumental in advancing practice settings and in supporting the needs of their patients through experiences and policy-based initiatives. It is important for nurses to be active participants in promoting policies that support practice settings and to provide a basis for influencing how policies are generated (Mason et.al, 2013). Furthermore, nurses must demonstrate ethical responsibility in their actions and demonstrate their knowledge of different practice methods on a regular basis (Mason et.al, 2013). This course has been influential in supporting a patient-centered care environment that will promote positive outcomes for patients and encourage them to be active participants in their own care plans (Kitson et.al, 2013). Nurses are involved in many aspects of patient care on many levels; therefore, they must possess the background and policy-based knowledge that is required to support a high degree of success in achieving the desired outcomes that will advance practice settings and promote patient compliance (Kitson et.al, 2013).

Nurses also demonstrate a higher level of knowledge in the advanced practice role, and this is critical to the success of nursing practice on a comprehensive basis (Hamric et.al, 2013). It is important to identify the resources that are required to invoke change in nursing practice and to provide a basis for exploring new insights that will improve practice, while also identifying higher level needs that require advanced practice knowledge (Hamric et.al, 2013). Nurses at all levels must identify with their roles and demonstrate their ability to be effective communicators of change, while also considering other opportunities for growth that will invoke change and progress within the practice setting (Joel, 2013). These factors provide a means of enabling nurses to recognize how policy and direct care are related and how to improve the lives of their patients by using a balanced strategy to encourage patients to stimulate their own recovery through individual behaviors (Joel, 2013).

Conclusion

Nurses play an essential role in the lives of their patients, in addition to serving as key advocates of change within the practice setting. It is important to identify these challenges and to recognize the importance of shaping practice objectives that will also encourage nurses to be active promoters of self-care and collaborative approaches to care and treatment. This course has been influential in providing a framework for understanding the complexities of the nursing role and how it shapes the practice environment, along with a means of expanding knowledge that will encourage nurses to serve as knowledge experts and effective communicators regarding nursing practice and policies that impact patients on a continuous basis.

References

Hamric, A. B., Hanson, C. M., Tracy, M. F., & O’Grady, E. T. (Eds.). (2013). Advanced practice nursing: An integrative approach. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Joel, L. A. (2013). Advanced Practice Nursing: Essentials of Role Development. FA Davis.

Kitson, A., Marshall, A., Bassett, K., & Zeitz, K. (2013). What are the core elements of patient?centred care? A narrative review and synthesis of the literature from health policy, medicine and nursing. Journal of advanced nursing, 69(1), 4-15.

Mason, D. J., Leavitt, J. K., & Chaffee, M. W. (2013). Policy and Politics in Nursing and Healthcare-Revised Reprint. Elsevier Health Sciences.