Nursing Education and Practice Essay

What Does It Mean to Be a Nurse?

Nursing is a profession that involves taking care of people who suffer from various problems. Nurses have a wide field for practice, working with patients of different ages, and providing assistance to attending medical doctors and surgeons. Contrary to the common opinion that nurses can only be the helpers to the doctor, they can work individually. What is more, some of them, such as nurse practitioners, are given the right to examine the patients in order to make a diagnosis and prescribe the necessary medicinal drugs. During their shift, nurses perform a variety of activities. For example, they develop individual plans of care for the patients, provide assistance to attending medical doctors in order to increase the effectiveness of the treatment, and regularly visit the patients to inquire about their health.Nursing Education and Practice Essay

Nurses are extremely important as professionals because they often act as intermediaries between attending medical doctors and patients. Due to the critical part that nurses play in medical monitoring support, their work is supposed to measure up to exacting standards. Thus, a professional in nursing should be aware of the theoretical foundation of this field of science and possess developed skills of reducing the theory to nursing practice. Nevertheless, there is an opinion that nursing education programs often lack reference to practice, and this is why there is a misbalance between these two aspects of the professional development of a nurse (Hatlevik, 2012, p. 868). According to the people who adhere to this opinion, nowadays, there is a significant gap between the education and practice of the nurses, and it has a negative influence on the quality of medical care.Nursing Education and Practice Essay

Nursing Education

Nursing education is considered to be extremely important; it involves various training that is to prepare future nurses for the peculiarities of the work that they will have to perform. The courses that are available in many countries can provide future specialists with knowledge on both general nursing or more specific fields of this science. There are many nursing specialties that students are allowed to choose from, but all the students need to know how to put theory into practice in order to render a proper assistance to the patients. Education programs for future nurses are supposed to touch upon both theory and practice of nursing.Nursing Education and Practice Essay

Nevertheless, in many cases students feel that their teachers do not pay enough attention to explaining them how to cope with problems that appear during their nursing practice. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that some nursing instructors focus their attention on theoretical foundations of the nursing science. To be honest, this problem is urgent not only for the field of nursing. With the start of their professional career, many students of different study fields find out that they have no idea now to solve some challenging tasks that have not been discussed during their education period. Besides having knowledge on taking care after the patients, any professional nurse should know how to control the anxiety and act effectively in some extreme cases that may occur during the working hours. In support of modern nursing education system, the theories of nursing practice are used during the education (Henderson, Cooke, Creedy, & Walker, 2012, p. 299). At the same time, they are not likely to be paid enough attention to; the problems that the theory touches upon are not always the same to the ones that occur during the practice, and students feel that they are going to be unable to work out the problems as they come up.Nursing Education and Practice Essay