Your journey continues in Professional Seminar II as we think about who we are as nurses and what we do, based on our philosophy of nursing.
This assignment may be a new experience for some of you but it will help you to “unpack” the meaning of the words cited in your philosophy of nursing.
For example, many of you might use the word – caring. This is purposefully a broad word that is revealed in attitudes, values and behaviors. If we look up the word caring in the dictionary, this may give us some clues. In the online dictionary, caring has several meanings but this is one that seems to apply: “ to watch over; be responsible for” (retrieved 2/5/07 at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/caring)
The idea of watching over could be expanded and more could be said about responding to the patient or being responsible for their welfare. Each of you will have different words to unpack but start there with the basics.
Include 4-5 scholarly references to support your concepts, two of which may be the course texts. The next step is to reveal how your philosophy of nursing and your expertise are connected. This is where you get to tell about the things that you do to reveal caring or other descriptors that you have in your philosophy. In From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public by Buresch and Gordon, chapter five discusses the process of creating anecdotes and arguments. For this assignment, you are to write a brief anecdote that showcases your expertise. The last part of this assignment is to discuss how you want to expand your expertise in the future. Specifically, you should establish a long term goal for your professional development that could be accomplished in the next 5-10 years. Take this long term goal and break it down into smaller, sequential goals supported by specific actions that you will need to take. Be creative and dream! Many things are possible if you plan for them. In total, this document should be six to eight pages in length not including the cover or reference pages and be presented as a formal paper in APA format. This will be graded using the GPS Guidelines for Papers.