Inculcating Skills For Graduate Nurses And Challenges For Transitional Nurses: A Review

1. Some of the skills which have to be inculcated by graduate nurses that increase their scope of employability are efficient and effective communication, dignity and privacy of being able to manage the administration of medication and exhibiting professional behaviour of nursing (Brown & Cookes, 2016). However, nursing as a profession is extraordinary and requires some unique traits of personality along with skills that are extraordinary.

• Empathy and compassion: It shall be important for the nurse to empathise with the patient. It encompasses performing tasks that are more than just performing some of the day-to-day duties mechanically. Empathy is one of the prime aspects of healthcare as it is related to positive outcomes for both the nurse as well as the patient (Duarte, Pinto-Gouveia & Cruz, 2016). The nurse must be polite and gentle towards the patient in attitude. Moreover, there should be an attitude where the nurse can make the patient trust that she is aware and confident of what she is doing.
• Interpersonal skills: Ranging from compassion to exceptional communication with a caring and nurturing attitude along with a proper knowledge base, the nurse should have a solid knowledge of the various social aspects of human behaviour. Emotional intelligence is crucial to becoming a successful nurse.
• Teamwork abilities: Teamwork is one of the essential skills that must be possessed by nurses, and it includes various elements of communication along with development and support on a regular basis. Nurses who can portray the ability of their contribution to the team, as well as the same of the team, on the whole, turns out to be a good employee.

2. Ongoing professional development in nursing helps in improving the productivity of professionals along with engagement and motivation as well as the overall performance of the nurse. Nurses, through professional development, remain keeping updated with the training they receive, which is next delivered by the nurse to their patient in the form of the best care. According to Cooper et al. (2017), the registered nurses (RN) working in hospitals and nursing homes must have some knowledge, skills and competencies along with expertise that will enable them to provide high-quality care for the patients. Ongoing professional development helps the colleagues and managers of nurses to comprehend what they are doing and whether they need any kind of support from their peers for maintaining a practice that is safe and effective.

According to Holley (2016), registered nurses must be able to develop some competencies as a set for measuring the performance of the registered nurses. Else they should continue being measured by physician metrics. After a nurse has become registered, she is required to assess, observe and speak to patients regularly, which is a part of their job role or duty. The nurse is required to record the details along with the symptoms of the patient and its medical history as well as its current health. Registered nurses prepare the patients for clinical examination and treatment. Administration of medication followed by monitoring the patient constantly after the same for observing any adverse reactions and side effects are some of the requirements that registered nurses need to perform.

3. According to Hofler and Thomas (2016), the nurses who are just graduating and transitioning to the position of registered nurses face a number of challenges that impact the successful transition of the same. Various organisations in the field of healthcare must thus understand how such changes are impacting the transition into the environment of practice. When newly graduated nurses can secure a safe position in their workplace, the journey of employment becomes a very smooth journey for the concerned nurse. One of the biggest challenges faced by the nurses is time management, along with the development of organisational skills. Some of the concerns which bother the phase of transition are gaps between practice as well as theory, taking care of immensely complex patients, administration of proper medication at proper times, skills of making the assessment of the patient, as well as documentation skills. Skills Required For Graduate Nurses Example Paper

Importance Of Ongoing Professional Development In Nursing

Apart from these, other major challenges include the expectation of the role, lack of confidence in the nurses, issues with orientation, fear of workload and competency in the job. Factors such as responsibility, support, the physical environment and professional development often create a feeling of dissatisfaction among employees. Thus, one of the concerns lies in rendering the registered nurses with proper inaugural orientation, which is a vital step in the phase of transition from the role student to that of a registered nurse that can give the nurse’s job satisfaction and confidence for the job. Transitional support programs, when provided to nurses, can promote such confidence through the sharing of various kinds of experience (Baker, 2020).

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4. On the Career Hub portal of Flinders University, there are a large number of options available for nursing students. There is a section in the website under the name of “Support and services”, which renders academic advocacy, online support to students, and online lounge to help students access learning material, online library and student guides which can help nursing students obtain any kind academic information they won’t obtain on their academic course. In the section of Learning Lounge, students can talk with a learning advisor who stays on the university campus within their working hours (Flinders University, n.d.). Also, there is an online learning advisor who can be connected through live chat from the portal itself via the segment of ‘Studiosity’.

Rivaz et al. (2017) opined that the attraction and retention of well-educated and qualified nurses enable ensuring the safety of patients. Resource utilisation is a good service that is consumed or the use of the required resources within a certain period of time. With the utilisation of resources, nurses can develop certain recommendations which shall encourage nurses to remain within the profession. All students can access a certain number of interactions every year. The learning advisors can guide a student in understanding the requirement of an assignment, structuring them, understanding the conventions of reference, enhancing the writing and presentation style, and improving their grammatical efficiencies. The segment of Studiosity live chat offers personal interaction whereby helping the student with solving the study questions.

5. AHPRA: This is the abbreviated form of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. The main role played by this agency is to work with 15 national boards, which helps protect the public of Australia through the regulation of the health practitioners who are registered. Another role of this agency is to protect and set standards for the public along with policies that all registered healthcare workers must meet.

Challenges Faced By Newly Graduated And Transitioning Nurses

NMBA: It is the abbreviated form of the Nurse and Midwifery Board of Australia. The various roles of NMBA include overseeing the registration of the practitioner, setting professional codes and standards along with guidelines for nurses and midwives, handling and managing different kinds of notifications as well as complaints associated with the profession, assessing the practitioners who wish to practice nursing in Australia and giving approval to various codes of study (“Nurses and midwives in Australia”, n.d.).

ANMAC: It stands for Australian Nursing and Midwifery Accreditation Council that helps in the protection of the health and safety of the community of Australia through the promotion of immensely high-quality standards for educating midwifery and nursing education. This organisation also accredits providers of education and the various study programs involved in nursing education.

ANMF: It is the abbreviated form of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, which is a governing agency in Australia. The agency participates in developing midwifery and nursing policies that relate to its practices, regulation and professionalism, education and training and socio-economic welfare as well as workforce. ANMF develops policies for community welfare, care of the aged people and occupational health and safety as well along with social justice and industrial relations.

ACN: It is the abbreviated form of Australian Company number. This is a particular code or number which is implemented to prevent confusion. When any organisation is given an ACN number, it is identified with a unique code (Australian Financial Security Authority, n.d.).

6. According to Karam et al. (2018), through their leadership, nurses can foster a culture that encourages role models and values to foster teamwork in the organisation. Nursing as a profession stands out of all other professions of healthcare due to the healing relationships which nurses can cultivate in the minds of the patients. In nursing, professionals have to intensively create a relationship with the patient and make them feel that the patients are being taken care of. The role of nurses is distinct from that of all other healthcare professionals as they can get a very wide practising scope as well as an approach to medicinal usage and medical care. The nurses play all the roles of healthcare professionals in a clubbed and integrated manner. This includes promoting health, preventing illness and taking care of individuals, which includes those people who are ill or disabled both mentally and physically.

Inter-professional education in nursing and healthcare and nursing is a model where the nursing and other professionals of healthcare workers in a collaborative manner (Lawlis et al., 2016). In the case of students who are pursuing nursing or other healthcare education, this interprofessional education can be implemented across several disciplines of healthcare which will help in building inter-professional collaboration and communication, thereby facilitating teamwork.  With the help of this pod, the nursing students and other students of healthcare can better understand each other’s roles through the sharing of experiences.

Support Services Available For Nursing Students

7. A personal challenge that I have faced as a graduate nurse is coping with the workload in due course of working. There are several pieces of literature that describe the workload challenge in graduate nurses. This workload is not defined very clearly, and it gets assessed by asking nurses to respond to interviews about the workload they face, especially a particular dimension of workloads such as mental load or the amount of work to be done (van den Oetelaar et al., 2016). There are three different levels of workload for nurses- unit-level, job-level and task-level. Often, the workload has been found to have a severe effect on the intention of nurses to leave or on the outcome of their jobs, both in a direct manner and as a mediating factor. When the turnover of nurses in any hospital is more, a lot of costs is incurred upon the training of new nurses or giving employment to temporary nurses. Hence, care has to be taken that nurses can have a work-life balance and not face employee burnout.

There are various support programs that support graduate nurses in their years of practice. There still remain several unmet needs on the social, clinical and emotional aspects. Some of the graduate nurses believed that the expectations of the organisation from them and the workload they received were completely unrealistic (Hussein et al., 2017). A heavy workload of nurses is associated with suboptimal care of patients, which in turn is associated with the satisfaction of patients. There are several pieces of evidence that describe the impact of the workload of nursing on the safety of patients. Strong evidence in literature significantly affects the various nursing-sensitive outcome of patients. A huge workload of nurses affects the time they devote to different tasks. Under huge pressure, they are unable to perform tasks that may be associated with the safety of patients. A heavy workload of nurses may bring down the time she spends communicating and collaborating with other patients or their doctors. The immense workload on graduate nurses can be the reason for making errors in executing work. Also, the excessive workload in nurses leads to deterioration of motivation which in turn hampers work.

8. All individuals, be it a student or an employee, faces workload at some point in time or the other. However, if the workload is inculcated for long, it may lead to stress, and hence, this issue needs to be resolved as soon as possible. Yasmin et al. (2018) state that some of the most common academic stressors for nursing students were the workload posed due to nursing assignments performed. Add to that, there are also clinical stressors such as lack of proper knowledge, enhanced duty hours and inadequate training, which affect the social, behavioural and emotional health of the nursing student. According to Lanz and Bruk-Lee (2017), resilience moderates the impacts of conflict at the workplace and consequently workload on the students, giving them the better outcome of jobs. To overcome the challenges posed due to workload and associated stress, the nursing student must acknowledge that he or she cannot perform all tasks together at the same time. One must be honest with acknowledging the things which cannot be done by him or her, both personally and professionally. The student should focus on their unique strengths. He or she should just not focus on completing a task that is not doable in the quest of reaching the target. The student must devote ample time to planning things and break them into segments throughout the day. For this, the tasks must be set with priority. Spending an effective hour of planning may resolve the issues associated with workload to a great extent. Time management can be successfully accomplished by the setting of priorities with the implementation of a time management model known as the Eisenhower matrix. This matrix helps in dividing tasks according to their importance and urgency. Another important way to reduce the burden of workload is to implement delegation or teamwork. In teamwork, the individual strengths of the members are clubbed together to get a fruitful outcome. Hence, this empowers the individuals and brings down the workload.

Role Of Regulatory Bodies

9. As opined by Tharani, Hussain and Warwick (2017), students in nursing who lack confidence often hampers their clinical performance along with the way they deal with patients where they get stressed having to nurse patients or meet patients who are on mechanical equipment support. Lack of confidence is one of the greatest challenges faced by nursing students, as identified in the literature. Performance of clinical skill is one of the vital and influential sources of self-confidence among nursing students. Confidence is a significant influence that enables nurses to make a proper clinical judgement (Ray et al., 2022). The confidence of students to perform in a clinical setting is impacted by several factors such as lack of proper experience, the threats of making mistakes, handling difficult and stubborn patients, the uneasiness of being evaluated by the educators and professors, experiences which demean self-worth, lack of support from the senior nursing staffs and incidents associated patient death and the fear of unconsciously harming the patient while trying to render care to them. The presence of self-confidence among nursing students is reported to be one of the main aspects of attaining immense clinical performance. It has also been found that students who have a lot of self-confidence turn out to be effective nurses in their careers.

10. Mentorship from peer staff and seniors can be an effective strategy to restore confidence in students (Gomati, Jasmindebora & Baba, 2017). Through praising and acknowledging the accomplishments of self, a nursing student can easily boost self-confidence. When supervisors, teachers or seniors at workplaces specifically praise a student for doing something good, he or she gets an idea that the person is getting noticed and they can appreciate themselves eventually. A nursing student must inculcate expectations from himself or herself which are realistic. The student must learn from failures rather than getting demotivated (Liu et al., 2018). This shall be acquired when the student embraces a mindset of growth within himself. These are some of the ways in which the challenge of lack of confidence among nursing students can be overcome.

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Importance Of Nursing Leadership

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