Professional Growth in Nursing

Professional Growth in Nursing Profession

Professional Growth In Nursing: Occupational Health concepts in nursing by Webster 1989, Abraham Flexner (1910), Kramer (1974) and Styles (1983) views.

Occupation and Profession

Professional Growth In Nursing: Occupation is defined as “An occupation that requires further education and usually involves intellectual rather than physical work. Such as teaching, engineering, especially medicine, law or theology” (Webster 1989) and Abraham Flexner (1910)

“studied medical education and other disciplines. And later published in an article on social work a list of criteria which he believed to be characteristic of all true professions”.

Flexner believed in professional work:

It’s basically intellectual (as opposed to physical).
It is based on learnable knowledge.
It is more practical than theoretical.
It can be imparted through a professional educational process.
It has a strong bonded internal organization of members/participants.

And it has practitioners motivated by altruism (the desire to help others). Code of ethics. It have a professional culture and be the main source of income for those who practice it.

Kramer (1974) identified the following characteristics of an occupation Professional competence that has an intellectual component:

It give Great autonomy in the exercise of this professional competence.
It is Strong commitment to a specialty-based career Influence and responsibility in the use of specialty competencies.
It help Development of training spaces controlled by the professional group.

Decision-making according to internalized norms. Miller (1985) found that the defining characteristics of nursing professionalism are as follows:

Acquire a knowledge in a university environment and a scientific orientation at graduate level in nursing.

Because It acquire competencies derived from the theoretical basis in which the “diagnosis and treatment of human reactions to real or potential health problems” can be carried out. Describe and specify the skills and competences that represent the frontiers of expertise.

And growth of nursing professionalism can be seen in terms of specialized training, knowledge base, ethics, and autonomy.

Professionalism and Nursing

Professional behavior of nurses

Miller (1985) described that the degree to which a nurse behaves as a professional is reflected in the following five behaviors:

The professional Assess, plan, implement and evaluate nursing theory, research, and practice. And these behaviors are reflected throughout the nursing process.

So, it Accepts, promotes, and maintains the interdependence of theory, research and practice. So these three elements make nursing a profession rather than a task-oriented activity.

And it Communicates and disseminates theoretical knowledge and research to the care community. And professionalism must be demonstrated through the support, advice and assistance of other caregivers.

Its Social purposes and secondarily to the assertion of rights and the protection of special interests.

Styles (1983) writes that in order to maintain and develop the profession, nursing organizations must fulfill the following five functions:

Definition and professional regulations through the establishment and fulfillment of training and practice standards for generalists and specialists. And regulation is also achieved through the adoption of codes of ethics and standards of conduct.

Development of the knowledge base for practice in its broader and narrower components. Several theorists have made important contributions to the development of nursing knowledge. The main purpose of nursing theories is to generate nursing knowledge.

So, nurses have challenge in the future is to generate questions and formulate hypotheses from these published theories and then test these hypotheses through nursing research. Because only research can determine the usefulness of a theory, research makes an important contribution to the development of nursing knowledge.

And another significant contribution to nursing knowledge is the work of the North American Diagnostic Association. This group creates and extends a taxonomy of nursing diagnoses. So research is needed to determine the validity and reliability of these diagnoses.

So, this treatment of values, norms, knowledge and skills for novices and professionals for their application in practice. This function is largely fulfilled through nurse training and socialization processes. Socialization is the development in the individual of the qualities (skills, beliefs, habits, requirements) necessary to belong to and function in a group.

Than it communicate and defend the values and contributions of the field to multiple audiences and groups. This role requires care organizations to speak for careers from a position of broad support. It is an integral part of health legislation and policy.

Its concern for the social and general welfare of its members. So, this function is performed by professional nursing bodies in the country. Professional associations provide their members with social and moral support to fulfill their role as professionals and deal with their professional problems. For example through the association’s journals, the dissemination of current knowledge, new ideas and professional concerns.

It maintains the service orientation that differentiates the attention to the public. This orientation distinguishes nursing from a primarily profit-oriented profession. Altruism is considered by many to be the hallmark of a profession. Nursing has a tradition of service to others.