Meaning of Being a Professional Nurse

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Meaning of Being A Professional Nurse While doctors are said to dominate the healthcare fields for years, nurses are actually the largest group that plays a crucial role in supporting, caring, and saving lives. In fact, nursing is one of the most demanding and competitive jobs nowadays as many countries are facing shortage of nurses to take care of their huge populations. Just like other healthcare professions, nursing deals with life and death of patients; thus, a nurse must have specific standards as the profession requires to be called as a “professional” including knowledge, ethics, responsibilities, and so forth. Despite of many values being said; it is important to remember the heart of nursing is “to care for and to care about.” In order to understand what a professional nurse means, it is important to first know the meaning of a “profession,” which distinguishes itself from the meaning of a “job” in healthcare-related fields. Generally, a job is anything that you do and get paid for with or without a degree needed while a profession is majorly understood as a job that requires a qualified level of education and training skills with a “distinctive knowledge base which is kept up to date;” has its “own standards” with specific “ethical principles,” and is “accountable to patients and to the profession itself” (Calam, 1994, p. 1140). In other words, a professional nurse basically should have an updated knowledge of human health, effective critical thinking skills, adherence to ethics, justice, punctuality, organization, responsibilities, and especially a strong mind and tolerance power to cope with any situations. In addition, cooperation and ability to work as a team are inevitably important as neither a doctor nor nurse can work alone in term of saving lives. Yet, the most important thing in nursing, in my opinion, is dedication and the genuine “loving”

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