Nursing Profession: Yesterday & Today
When you are in your early twenties, fresh from a 4-year Nursing course with a very shiny professional license to boot, you will be naturally beset with both feelings of anxiety and excitement. Anxiety, thinking that the four years of easy college life were not enough to prepare you for the challenges ahead. The related learning experiences you went through seemed lacking in detail and opportunity. Yet, at the same time you are excited. A new phase of your life has been opened. A new path is waiting to be discovered.
Never mind the excitement. Anxiety sets in and boggles your mind more than anything, right? Hey, every newly graduate would feel such anxiety stemming from inadequacy. But no one will be downright honest and admit it. The 4-year Nursing Education Program did not happen overnight. It was a 2-year Graduate course long before your parents met. And those graduate nurses attended to the sick and the dying in every hospital in the country, sometimes becoming president of the Board of Nursing, or better yet, making a big name in the same profession overseas!
So, where is the anxiety stemming from the feeling of unpreparedness and inadequacy comes from? What can be done to help you overcome such fears and take the necessary step forward? Let's take a look at the Midwifery Program long before your Aunt Nurse Olivia's time. After finishing an education program for Midwifery, the fresh graduate after successfully securing her professional license to practice will be recommended to undergo an on-the-job training at a domiciliary obstetric clinic. Here, she will get the necessary skills she needs to have prior to actually practice the profession on her own. At the said clinic the fresh graduate will be trained and honed to become more assertive and better skilled in her line of work.
So, what about the nurses? There's no such program for the nurses. After they graduate and pass the board examinations, they will naturally start sending applications to various hospitals and medical facilities. They will undergo a minimum of three-month training, which can be defined as a paid or unpaid 8-hour duty or one month of training with a preceptor, and two months duty on her own under observation. Some hospitals though require a training fee from the newbies. Whether or not these institutions pay or not these OJT's, the volunteers cannot deny the fact that they do not benefit from such experience. A seminar-lecture or conference con laboratory that consists of 48 contact hours cannot measure up to the actual clinical nursing skills that day-to-day actual clinical or hospital cases attend to.
As an end, we cannot really say that the quality of nurses produced nowadays are far better than before just because of the advancement in technology as well as teaching methods and curricula. Development and improvement in every aspect of the Nursing profession is but a desirable thing, but it will not hurt to look a bit deeper into the past accounts of the profession. How did the lack in advancement of technology and methods made them the best nurse-professors they are? How were they able to sustain the passion for the Nursing profession? Go and ask. It wouldn't hurt, would it?
