NR 549 Week 7 Professional Identity Paper Example

Professional Identity Paper: Four Commitments Stated as Activities and Anchored to Published Lines, Two Places Where the Documents Fit a Step-Down Charge Nurse Badly, and the Wording I Would Put in Their Place

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 549: Foundational Concepts for Professional Nursing Practice

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Professional Identity Paper: Four Commitments Stated as Activities and Anchored to Published Lines, Two Places Where the Documents Fit a Step-Down Charge Nurse Badly, and the Wording I Would Put in Their Place

Why Activities

A professional identity paper can easily become a list of qualities: caring, integrity, commitment. None of those can be checked. This paper states my identity as a nurse through four activities I do or am committed to doing, each tied to a line in a document a reader can look up. It then names two places where the published descriptions fit my work badly and proposes what those lines should say instead. At present I split my shifts between bedside care and charge duty on a cardiac telemetry unit; my intended role after this program is unit-based clinical nurse educator.

Commitment 1: Escalating When Staffing Is Unsafe

Activity: As charge nurse, I refuse an admission when every nurse is at maximum assignment and a patient is unstable, and I escalate to the house supervisor with the specific numbers.

Anchor: Provision 3, which frames the nurse as the patient's protector and advocate for safety (American Nurses Association, 2015).

Evidence I do it: Three documented escalations in the last quarter, two of which led to a float nurse being sent.

Commitment 2: Checking Delegated Work

Activity: At the start and midpoint of each shift, I confirm with the patient care technician which vital signs and glucose values are due and that abnormal results will come to me.

Anchor: Provision 4, which leaves the delegating nurse answerable for the care delegated (American Nurses Association, 2015).

Evidence: A handoff checklist I introduced on our unit last year, now used by most charge nurses.

Commitment 3: Bringing Evidence to Unit Practice

Activity: I will bring the current evidence on heart failure discharge education to the unit practice council this term, with a proposal to revise our protocol.

Anchor: Provision 7, which asks every nurse to help move the profession forward through inquiry, standards work and policy (American Nurses Association, 2015). Also Domain 4 of the AACN Essentials, which expects master's-prepared nurses to translate evidence into practice (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021).

Evidence: Not yet done. This is a commitment, and I state it as one so it can be verified when the term closes.

The proposal will include the current evidence, a comparison with our protocol and a plan for piloting the change on one shift pattern first.

Commitment 4: Precepting New Graduates Through Transition

Activity: I precept new graduates through their first twelve weeks, with planned attention to the moments when the role shifts from deferring to being deferred to.

Anchor: Provision 5's reference to "continue personal and professional growth," read as extending to fostering growth in others, and the AACN Essentials' Domain 10, Personal, Professional, and Leadership Development (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021). The transition shock literature describes why this support matters in the first weeks (Duchscher, 2009).

Evidence: Four new graduates precepted in two years, all still on the unit.

Where the Documents Fit Badly: Provision 7

Provision 7 holds every nurse, whatever the role or setting, to advancing the profession through research, standards development and policy. For a staff nurse on a step-down unit, this line describes activities that no shift schedule makes room for. As written, it either sets a standard most staff nurses cannot meet or is read as aspirational, which weakens the force of the whole Code.

Reason the fit is poor: The provision assumes that every nurse has access to research, standards and policy work. Staff nurses mainly contribute to these through their practice: reporting safety events, taking part in practice councils, piloting new protocols and collecting data. The interpretive statements do mention a range of contributions, but the provision itself does not.

Proposed wording: "The nurse, in all roles and settings, contributes to the advancement of the profession through participation in inquiry, standards development and policy, in ways appropriate to the nurse's role, education and practice setting." This keeps the obligation universal and makes it meetable by a staff nurse on an ordinary schedule.

Where the Documents Fit Badly: Informatics in the Essentials

The AACN Essentials treat informatics as a full domain for all graduates, focusing on using data and technology to improve care (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021). My hospital's educator job description, by contrast, limits informatics to training staff on documentation systems. For the role I am preparing for, the Essentials ask for more than the job allows, and the job asks for something the Essentials barely mention: the hands-on work of teaching colleagues to use new equipment safely.

Reason the fit is poor: The Essentials set out outcomes for every advanced role at once, and the informatics domain is written with system-level roles in mind. A unit educator's daily informatics work is mostly teaching tools, not analyzing data.

Proposed wording for the job description: "Teaches staff to use clinical technologies and documentation systems safely, and uses unit quality and safety data to identify and evaluate education needs." This keeps the hands-on work the hospital needs and adds a data-use duty that matches the Essentials without asking a unit educator to act as a data analyst.

What the Paper Shows About Identity

Stated as activities, my professional identity is narrower and easier to check than a list of qualities would suggest. Three of the four commitments are already in my practice; one is a promise. Arguing with the documents is part of the identity too. A committee wrote each of these texts as its best effort to describe the whole profession, and a nurse who can point to where a line fits poorly and propose a better one is taking part in the professional standards development that Provision 7 describes.

The two disagreements with the documents are also commitments of a kind. I intend to send the proposed wording for the job description to the nurse manager and the current educator this term, and to raise the Provision 7 point at the hospital ethics committee's open forum, which invites comment on professional documents once a year. Arguing with a document in a paper is the start; arguing with it where it can change is the purpose.

Both are small steps, and both are checkable.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education.

American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements.

Duchscher, J. E. B. (2009). Transition shock: The initial stage of role adaptation for newly graduated registered nurses. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(5), 1103-1113. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04898.x