Running Head: PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY OF NURSING 1

Personal Philosophy of Nursing

Courtney Jones

Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing

Dr. Turner

NUR 4140

October 20th, 2019

Honor Code: “I pledge”

Personal Philosophy of Nursing

Nursing is more than just merely a profession; it is a vocation and mission to give

yourself to others in hopes of improving their health outcomes. Although nursing represents

something different to everyone, one asset that all nurses embody is their passion to serve others.

Definition of Nursing

I personally define nursing as a calling and dedication to aid those in need and a

commitment to better the lives of patients of who are suffering. Nursing is more than offering a

patient curing methodologies, administering medications, and documenting a patient’s status; it

is being a patient’s advocate, psychological supporter, and cheerleader no matter the situation at

hand. Nursing involves providing patient-centered, holistic care and addressing a patient’s needs

concerning their mind, body, and spirit. Nursing also entails being a patient’s educator and

teaching each individual patient health promotion qualities that are applicable to their condition.

Nursing is not passing judgment on any patient seeking care nor allowing bias to interfere in a

patient’s quality of care. Included in Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing philosophy

statement, the tenets of nursing, caring, and service resonate with me.

The Bon Secours tenant of nursing speaks to me because as a professional nurse I

intended to practice and provide holistic nursing care to all of my patients. Nurses do not solely

provide medical care; they provide patients with emotional and spiritual support in order to fulfill

all patient needs. The tenant further discusses that nurses are lifelong learners, critical thinkers,

and adaptors to change. It is imperative that nurses remain up to date on the newest evidenced

based practice in order to critically think about the evolving individual care that each patient

requires and are capable of adapting to technological advancements and practice standards. The

tenant of caring coincides with my nursing practice as I make a commitment to my patients to

provide them a supportive and therapeutic healing environment. In addition to practicing holistic

patient care, I also ensure I provide optimal patient care by prioritizing self-care in order to

ensure I am able to give my patients my all. Lastly, the tenant of service is vital to the field of

nursing; Bon Secours instills in its students that providing care to vulnerable populations,

respecting a patient’s health care wishes, and providing good help to those in need are essential.

Personal Philosophy

A nurse’s personal philosophy will influence all aspects of their practice as a professional

nurse, such as their communication and collaboration with patients, the grade of kindness they

provide, the degree of integrity they portray when caring for patients from all walks of life, and

even their degree of answerability to ensure that all possible mistakes are prevented. My personal

philosophy of nursing is mirrored in my nursing practice each and everyday I enter the hospital. I

always strive to brighten my patients day from the very start of my shift during bedside shift

report; I make it a habit to always enter my patients rooms with a smile of my face, introduce

myself, extend a therapeutic touch, and deliver a thoughtful “good morning, how did you sleep

last night?” I continue to extend this kind and caring disposition throughout the rest of my shift; I

continuously utilize therapeutic communication and dedicate time to each and every patient to

ensure all of their needs are being met. Another aspect of my philosophy that I practice is

providing holistic nursing care, I always relay to my patients that healing of the mind, body, and

spirit are all equally important and their needs can extend beyond physiological. Furthermore, I

always withhold a non-judgmental and non-biased attitude with my patients, all patients deserve

to be treated equally and with respect. My philosophy also entails always being my patients

advocate, whether that entails expressing my patients needs and desires to the appropriate

personnel, providing my patient with resources, or even speaking up for my patient when others
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fail to. Lastly, I always strive to learn something new and learn from those around me to better

care and connect with my patients; my clinical and immersion experiences have enabled me to

gain guidance and skills from the non-novice nurses I working alongside. All of these bedside

mannerisms, communication techniques, and therapeutic modalities mentioned are all points that

I incorporate into my nursing practice daily.

Values and Beliefs

Whether you are a novice student nurse or expert professional nurse, it is important to

evaluate and come to footings with your personal and professional values and beliefs when

graduating into the profession of nursing. As an eager and new nursing student, my beliefs were

oriented towards my goal of becoming a nurse. For example, in my initial philosophy paper I

touched on the fact that I believe that everyone has an individual purpose in life, which mine is

to utilize my compassion to help those in need. I further touched on the fact that I believe all of

my future patients are to be looked at as a person and not just as a mere diagnosis or room

number and deserve to be treated with respect, autonomy, and compassion. I still agree with

these beliefs from NUR1100, however, I would like to add that as I near the end of nursing

school, I highly believe in the power of holistic, patient-centered care and that simply attending

to a patient’s basic needs and offering emotional support make a world of difference in a

patient’s quality of care and recovery.

My values from NUR1100 to now are still similar and aligned; I continue to resonate

with the values of respect, compassion, and integrity. Respect is a value that holds upmost

importance in the field of nursing; it is the backbone of upholding quality patient care and

embodies recognizing a patient’s healthcare decision with no judgment and delivering the same

degree of care to each and every patient. Compassion is a subsequent value of extreme
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importance; I believe that every patient should be flowered with compassion to ease his or her

vulnerability and distress. Lastly, integrity is a value I cherish deeply. Personally, I look at

integrity through the perspective of providing the highest quality of care that I know patients

deserve. I also classify integrity as fulfilling my duty as a nurse to ensure that I am providing my

patients with safe nursing care; which entails performing all of my patients rights and checks,

protecting my patient’s privacy, admitting to mistakes, and upholding commitments I make to

my patients. Although nursing school hasn’t necessarily changed my beliefs and values, I now

have a greater knowledge base from being in the clinical setting and caring for patients and have

an increased capability as to how to practice my beliefs and values as a professional nurse.

Nurse Patient Encounter

An example a nurse-patient relationship that reflects my nursing philosophy is during my

labor and delivery clinical rotation. I was assigned to the triage nurse who was preparing a

mother for a C-section, from the moment the patient was admitted to the moment the patient’s

beautiful baby boy was delivered I was by the patient’s side talking her through the process,

aiding in keeping her calm, and initiating conversation and trading stories to keep her mind at

ease. I even had the opportunity to take pictures of the patient’s newborn considering the mother

wasn’t able to due to the C-section. By the end of my shift, the patient and her family were so

grateful for the care and compassion that I exhibited that the patient’s mother went out and

bought me a gift from bath and body works as a thank you. As a professional nurse, I intend to

practice and fulfill my philosophy each and everyday. Furthermore, this particular patient

scenario aligns with Bon Secours Professional Practice Model as my actions demonstrated

practicing loving kindness, developing a helping-trusting relationship, creating a healing

environment, and assisting with physical, emotional, and spiritual human needs.
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Change Agent

Nurses play a pivotal role in shaping and influencing the healthcare system considering

nurses are the forefront agents of bedside patient care and observe changes that need to be made

concerning safe, quality, and efficacious care. For my NUR4143 practicum experience, I was

placed on a cardiac telemetry step-down unit where I have had the ability to absorb and adopt the

role of a professional nurse including being a patient advocate, educator, and healer. As a result

of my immersion experience, I have had the opportunity to act as a change agent. One of the

aspects that I initially noticed on the unit was a high nurse-to-patient ratio, which decreased the

amount of individualized bedside patient care. Therefore, I took what I observed as an

opportunity for me to make a difference. The unit is striving to hire more nurses so I evaluated

the ways in which I could make a positive impact, which is by dedicating more time to my

patients. By doing so, I was able to provide an increase in holistic care, patient education, and

health maintenance and promotion activities in hopes of decreasing hospital readmissions. I am a

firm believer in the powerfulness of educating patients on health promotion and disease

prevention strategies and is something I will carry with me throughout my professional practice.

Additionally, I have also acted as a change agent in my immersion experience by

incorporating aspects from my quality improvement project into my nursing practice.

Considering a large portion of patient falls are due to elimination, a change needs to come to

light in order to decrease the frequency. My synthesis project surrounds the effects of targeted

toileting practices on decreasing the instances of inpatient falls. Therefore, I have taken the data,

evidence, and critical thinking strategies that my group members and I have cultivated and

incorporated them into my nursing practice while at immersion. I have done so by initiating fall

prevention strategies such as utilizing the stay with me policy, assessing a patient’s at home
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toileting routines or difficulties, writing the times a patient voids on the white board, and

conducting hourly rounds in hopes of precipitating a change to decrease the incidence of

inpatient falls surrounding toileting.

Benner’s Theory

Benner’s theory illustrated in the book, From Novice to Expert, seeks to explain the

importance of clinical experience in a student nurses journey. Benner incorporated Dreyfus’s

Model of Skills Acquisition to conceptualize her theory that clinical skills and expertise are

absorbed over time through a series of five stages of proficiency including novice, advanced

beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The novice stage speaks to beginner clinicians with

no experience concerning the situation at hand; novice nurses are initially presented with

objective parameters such as intake, output, blood pressure, and temperature to gain necessary

experience required for further skill acquisition (Benner, 2001, p. 20). Interestingly, the novice

stage is not limited to the nursing student population; it can also be situational and pertain to

clinicians entering an arena of a new patient population, such as an adult ICU nurse transitioning

to the PICU (Benner, 200, p. 21-22). As time and knowledge progress, the nurse enters into the

advanced beginner stage. The clinician entering the advanced beginner stage has now illustrated

slightly acceptable skill performance due to an increase in real-life situations and experiences.

Although, advanced beginner nurses still have difficulty in setting priorities and discriminating

between which tasks take precedence so patient needs to not go unmet (Benner, 2001, p. 25-45).

Patricia Benner’s third stage is the competent stage; the component nurse is one whom

has had experience gained in a field or similar field for two to three years (Benner, 2001, p. 26).

The competent nurse is able to plan, prioritize, cope, manager multiple patient’s care. The

characteristics of analytically planning and prioritizing are one of the important aspects that
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distinguish a competent nurse from a novice and advanced beginner nurse (Benner, 2001, p. 26-

27). As the competent clinicians continues to progress, they enter into the proficient stage. The

proficient nurse is characterized by their ability to understand situations as a whole and prioritize

and act based upon evidence and past experiences (Benner, 2001, p. 27). These past experiences

have instilled in the proficient nurse what to expect in a given situation and how to appropriately

respond to a patient’s particular condition. Lastly, the proficient nurse graduates into the expert

stage. The expert nurse now has an intuition guided from an immense background of clinical

knowledge and experience (Benner, 2001, p. 32). The expert nurse no long relies upon rules or

guidelines to direct their actions, but rather uses their profound grasp on the clinical picture and

situation at hand to guide them in what needs to be accomplished.

Action Plan for Moving Forward

As a soon to be new graduate nurse, I see myself as a novice that has transitioned into

the advanced beginner stage. The last three years I have had the ability to learn and gain

experience in a variety of clinical settings. My early clinical rotations allowed me to improve

particular hands-on skills and objective tasks. The latter portion of my clinical rotations,

specifically my immersion, has allowed me to continue to perfect those skills as well as increase

my prioritization, assessment, and critical thinking abilities. I am beginning to develop a picture

of tasks and education that I will need to complete throughout my shift as well as an idea of what

to typically expect regarding my patient’s particular diagnoses. I plan to transition to the stage of

competence by practicing as a new graduate nurse in the medical-surgical setting with the

guidance of a preceptor. I believe that dedicating two to three years practicing in the medical-

surgical setting will allow me to gain foundational knowledge and real-life experiences that are

necessary in order to progress to the next stage. This field of nursing will allow me to care for a
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wide variety of patients and will aid me in learning how to effectively plan and prioritize care for

multiple patients with diverse needs. I also plan to join a nurse residency program, which I feel

will not only assist me in learning necessary clinical skills but also aid in teaching me self-care

techniques and how to prevent nursing burnout. Furthermore, I also plan to extend my long-term

professional development by striving to earn my certification in medical-surgical nursing. Lastly,

I will continue to practice my self-care acts of exercising regularly, eating healthy, and utilizing

my support system in order to not only care for myself but to also ensure I am able to adequately

care for my patients.

Benner, P. (2001). From novice to expert: Excellence and power in clinical nursing practice

(commemorative ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.