There are a few personally rewarding careers, and one among them is nursing. It offers excellent job opportunities, flexible career advancement, professional respect, dignity, and the chance to improve people’s lives. Every student needs to understand that all fields, including healthcare, bear multiple challenges. However, the health sector is advantageous and demanding at the same time.
A nursing profession can help you provide specific attributes and professional characteristics to become a successful and satisfied nurse that is happy to serve others.
Professionalism means making sure that your physical appearance in terms of the clothing is reflective of your status as a medical expert. This is why you need to opt for the best nurse t shirts to make sure that everyone in the hospital (patients, families and medical vendors) know who you are and are able to accord you the respect that you deserve.
Read more to look at some of the best ways to level up as a nurse in healthcare settings!
In This Article
1. Empathize With Patients
Empathy understands others’ experiences and challenges in life. A nurse, while handling patients think according to their perspective and try to understand their situation. When no one cares about the patient’s needs who is resting helplessly in their hospital beds, it’s hurtful for them, and in no way their condition could get any better.
However, a nurse with empathy momentarily stops to see the patient is receiving everything they need suddenly changes the whole healthcare experience building genuine trust. Nurses serve many vulnerable individuals belonging to diverse backgrounds. For a nurse to predict the patient’s needs correctly and recognize their emotional or behavioral responses to care, empathy is critically required.
2. Become A Nurse Educator
There is a wide variety of gratifying career opportunities for nursing students. One such is to become a nurse educator. As a nursing professional, you can pass your wisdom to other students and working nurses to get a higher education degree or diploma. Many schools provide in-person and online DNP programs for nurse educators that lead to multiple beneficial fields for nurses, such as becoming professors, being involved in clinical research, reviewing professional works, and gaining funding for research projects.
These nurse educators prepare nursing students to hone and develop their core competencies to serve patients better and become future nurse educators to continue the chain.
3. Emotional And Mental Stability in Workplace
Nurses work in a challenging environment that demands mental strength. Every day comes with powerful emotions of delight, sorrow, surprise, and frustration. It’s a routine job for nurses and to effectively manage their patient’s needs in such situations is their skills and expertise. They stay calm while being in a stressful and upsetting environment to ensure every patient receives what they need.
Research reveals that an emotionally stable nurse can better focus, solve problems, and offer exceptional patient safety. Similar to empathy, it is a skill that you learn with time and requires nurses to stay calm and patient as much as possible. Most practical approaches to diffuse intense responses include balancing perspectives, being mindful, and reframing expectations.
4. Excellent Communication Skills
One of the essential qualities a nurse could get is top-notch communication skills. It acts as a bridge between patients, their families, and even doctors that bell nurses to collect and relay critical information. If any one of the medical professionals drops the ball, the outcomes can be devastating. Lack of communication can lead to medication errors, skipping valuable information on patient discharge forms, or life-threatening allergic reactions that are not present in patient’s report charts.
To communicate effectively and transparently, nurses should read, write, and present factual data to others verbally. Nurses also use communication as a verbal and non-verbal therapeutic tool to create an interpersonal relationship with patients and their families. Therapeutic communication allows nurses to make patients feel comfortable enough to share their concerns honestly.
5. Critical Thinking in Decision Making
Critical thinking helps to assess data and to find out objectively the rational outcomes. It is a self-directed and systemic way of understanding things that nurses utilize to interpret patient information, focus on their needs, and troubleshoot clinical problems accurately. For instance, during triage, a nurse can use common diagnostic findings to establish that patient having chest pain is due to indigestion instead of a heart attack.
Nurses should have critical thinking ability as they work for the healthcare system, their practice is self-sufficient, and they are solely responsible for their professional decisions. While nurses efficiently perform their job, such as dressing wounds in seconds or start intravenous lines quickly, but lacking the ability to think critically, stressful circumstances can be daunting for them. Not every medical setting demand extraordinarily fast-paced decision, but in a crowded emergency unit nurses can’t avoid that.
Conclusion
A good nurse shares a long list of quality services in healthcare settings. To initiate introspection is essential to understand that some personal characteristics can help ease things and make them challenging at the same time. Where better communication enables you to build a trustworthy relationship with patients, critical thinking can allow you to make informed decisions. Nurses can learn, nurture, and grow in a way that will enable them to provide a better quality of healthcare and improves their personal and professional strength.
