Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal
Students are required to submit weekly reflective narratives throughout the course that will culminate in a final, course-long reflective journal due in Topic 10. The narratives help students integrate leadership and inquiry into current practice.
This reflection journal also allows students to outline what they have discovered about their professional practice, personal strengths and weaknesses, and additional resources that could be introduced in a given situation to influence optimal outcomes. Each week students should also explain how they met a course competency or course objective(s).
In each week’s entry, students should reflect on the personal knowledge and skills gained throughout the course. Journal entries should address one or more of the areas stated below. In the Topic 10 graded submission, each of the areas below should be addressed as part of the summary submission.
New practice approaches
Interprofessional collaboration
Health care delivery and clinical systems
Ethical considerations in health care
Practices of culturally sensitive care
Ensuring the integrity of human dignity in the care of all patients
Population health concerns
The role of technology in improving health care outcomes
Health policy
Leadership and economic models
Health disparities
While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and in-text citations and references should be presented using APA documentation guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
Sample Answer
Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal
Nurses work in a world that is full of challenges and problems. My knowledge and experience have allowed me to negotiate the complexities of healthcare systems to help patients and marginalized areas. As a consequence of my interactions with patients in a variety of clinical settings, I’ve been able to enhance my professional and leadership skills. I can no longer rely solely on my training experience or naive optimism about collaboration and cooperation as a bachelor’s degree nurse who intends to work in a variety of settings. As a consequence, my education and practical experience have strengthened my ability to manage and contribute to the delivery of high-quality healthcare to society’s most vulnerable people. I’ve also learned the healthcare framework, where I perform my obligations inside the medical center’s systematic structure.
New Approaches
This practice has given me the ability to look at things differently. Nursing has evolved significantly during the last few decades. I’ve managed to adapt to technology as a post-graduate nurse to stay current in my attempts to provide excellent patient care. The continued use of scientifically proven nursing methods, for example, has benefited in the treatment of health conditions such as pneumonia, cardiac arrest, diabetes, and obesity. I have also seen that such concepts are not widely implemented in healthcare and that a variety of strategies are used. Nursing, I’ve realized, is a discipline rich in practices that promote the use of empirical research. Today, the nursing profession has taken a leading role in improving care by putting study findings into practice.
Interprofessional Collaboration
A specific issue in healthcare may demand the involvement of many groups of specialists from distinct fields of specialization. This was one of the most fascinating learning scenarios I have ever seen. The importance of nurses in promoting change and improving health is apparent. As a result, a nurse must accept the fact that no single person can fulfill all of these duties. Most significantly, I’ve realized that inter-professional collaboration isn’t limited to clinical settings; it can also be found in educational settings. Inter-professional collaboration is essential for addressing issues including expanding research and innovation, limited resources, and increased demand for high-quality healthcare. According to (Avineri & Martel 2015), nurses also operate in settings where multidisciplinary professional collaboration takes place, not only in the treatment of specific patients but also in the support of framework procedures and approaches. Interprofessional teamwork is essential both within individual segments and within big healthcare organizations with huge departments of clinical and management experts.
Ethical Consideration, Practice of Culturally sensitive care and population Health Concern
Nurses must assess the degree of practice quality they deliver in a healthcare profession marked by an increased need for accountability and openness. Healthcare institutions must provide the highest possible levels of care without surrendering significant expenditures for patients to survive in a hard and competitive market. Regardless of the prices or makeup of the teams that get together to tackle health concerns, interprofessional collaboration enhances the possibility of achieving outstanding quality of practice. Nurses are constantly confronted with ethical dilemmas in the context of patient care. As a result, ethical difficulties might arise in any healthcare setting where basic ethical considerations of right and wrong support professional judgment and effective patient care. As a nurse, I realized how important it was to understand the ethical climate and culture of the healthcare facility where I worked (Souza et al., 2016). Ethical culture may be described as an organization’s approach to ethical issues and situations that lead to ethical questions or concerns. Obtaining legal guidance can help to maintain ethical standards in nursing.
Health Disparities, Policy, and Leadership
Even though the nurse must ensure that all patients have access to treatment, achieving health equality has proven challenging. There are racial discrepancies in people’s political access to health care, for example. Disparities are mostly created by disparities in people’s economic levels across the board. Poor blacks, for example, may have a harder time accessing better health care than whites in the middle class (Heiman et al., 2016). Through a process called selection, nurses may play a significant role in measuring and investigating health inequalities. Regional concerns, on the other hand, may have a considerable impact on the development of health disparities in the country, in my opinion. This may be viewed in terms of compositional and contextual impacts.
