The practice of nursing education is intriguing because of the potential it has for having a positive impact on the training and development of nurses and in engagements in public health education initiatives. In my desire to become an accomplished nurse educator, I will need to pursue continuous improvement strategies and grow both as a nurse and as an educator. This professional development plan details the area of focus for my nursing education journey, the associated professional goal, environmental influences, scholarship, leadership development, and the development plan.
My area of focus as a nurse educator is clinical nursing education (CNE). The focus area involves the provision of education and training services to nurses who are in direct contact with patients in clinical health settings, with the goal of education being to equip them with the knowledge and skills required to excel in providing high-quality services (Brennan & Olson, 2018). Successful CNE practice requires the educator to possess five critical competencies that enable the provision of relevant knowledge to the learners. From Brennan and Olson (2018)’s study findings, the competencies include intravenous (IV) therapy administration, performing urinary catheterization, cardiovascular assessment through electrocardiograms, application of proven ideologies in delivering content to adult learners, and expertise in designing and implementing a suitable curriculum for adult learners. According to Akram et al. (2018), the nurse educator bridges the gap between theory and practice. As such, while knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings for IV, catheterization, and electrocardiograms is necessary for the nurse educator, the demonstration of the practices is indispensable for nurse educators who need to prepare their nurses to develop the practical ability to perform these procedures. The competencies enable the educator to transfer necessary clinical knowledge and skills and use evidence-based teaching strategies when interacting with the students.
My goals as a future clinical nurse educator are to promote the critical thinking capabilities of clinical nurses, expose nursing students and trainees to real-life patient cases and their complexity, and impart nursing students with the skills for developing suitable health management plans. The goals are based on my nurse educator philosophy which is to promote nurses’ critical thinking capabilities by using real-life case studies to inform nursing trainees of the complexities of individual patients’ cases, the evidence-based practice (EBP) approaches to care, and the principles of clinical decision-making that inform the selection of a suitable health management plan. These goals are grounded in the adult learning theory of andragogy, which posits that adult learners benefit from the immediacy of applying acquired knowledge (Veiga-Branco, 2018). By exposing nursing students to patients with diverse needs, the learners will acquire critical thinking and decision-making skills oriented toward caring for patients.
The goals of critical thinking and the development of suitable management plans are inspired by the need for both skills in navigating nursing in the contemporary environment where interprofessional partnerships are essential. According to Purdue University Global (2022), the necessity for interprofessional partnerships has blurred the boundaries between professions, meaning that nurses who belong to such teams need to be astute in their knowledge, critical thinking, and decision-making. Similarly, the goal of exposing nursing students to a diversity of patient cases is in line with the current trend of elevated demands for the specialization of nurses in specific areas of medicine (Purdue University Global, 2022). An understanding of the diversity of patient needs would allow the nursing students to identify the particular patient needs that they are enthusiastic about solving, which would prepare them for specialization in specific areas of medicine.