Nursing as a profession

• Nursing as a profession requires extensive education or a calling that requires special knowledge, skill, and preparation.
• A profession is an occupation or calling requiring advance training and experience in some specific or specialized body of knowledge which provides service to society in that special field.
• Profession also refers to an occupation with preparation in specific knowledge in higher learning and the performance of practice.
• Professionalization is the process of becoming professional.
• Personal Qualities & Professional Proficiencies include initiative to improve self & service, competence in performing work, decision-making & communication skills, research orientation, and active participation in issues confronting nurses & nursing.
• A warm/pleasing personality is a characteristic of a nurse, reflecting poise, good complexion, good grooming, good posture, and art of conversation.
• Spiritual health is a part of personal qualities & professional proficiencies.
• Professionalism is the character, spirit, or methods of a set of attributes, a way of life that implies responsibility and commitment.
• The criteria of a profession include its requirement of prolonged, specialized training to acquire a body of knowledge pertinent to the role to be performed, an orientation of the individual toward service, either to a community or to an organization, ongoing research, a code of ethics, autonomy, and a professional organization.
• Nursing is a profession based on the criteria in the development of the professional status of nursing which include specialized education, a body of knowledge, service orientation, ongoing research, a code of ethics, autonomy, and a professional organization.
• Specialized education in nursing includes a baccalaureate degree, master’s degree, and doctoral degree.
• Nursing utilizes a well-defined and well-organized body of specialized knowledge that is on the intellectual level of higher learning.
• A number of nursing conceptual frameworks/theories guide education, practice, and research.
• The body of knowledge in nursing constantly enlarges and improves its techniques of education and services through use of scientific method.
• Service orientation in nursing is altruism, the hallmark of a profession, and an important component of the health care delivery system.
• Nursing is granted legal authority to define the scope of its practice, describe its particular functions and roles and determine its goals and responsibilities in delivery of healthcare.
• Nursing encompasses autonomous & collaborative care of individuals of all ages, families, groups & communities, sick or well in all settings, including the promotion of health, prevention of illness & the care of ill, disabled & dying people, as defined by the American Nurses Association in 2003.
• Nursing acts can contain all responses that all humans experience, as defined by Florence Nightingale in 1860 - 1969.
• Nursing involves advocacy, promotion of a safe environment, research, participation in shaping health policy & in patient & health systems management & education, as defined by the International Council of Nurses in 2002.
• Nursing functions autonomously in the formulation of nursing policies and thereby in the control of professional activity.
• Nursing is a quality of being that is expressed in the doing, as defined by Florence Nightingale in 1860 - 1969.
• Nursing is health maintenance and health restoration, implying valuing of some human potential beyond the narrow concept of health taken as absence of disease, as defined by Florence Nightingale in 1860 - 1969.
• Nursing serves humanity and social welfare.
• Nursing increases research to enhance education and guide nursing practice.
• A professional nurse is a person who has completed a basic nursing education program & is licensed in his/her country or state to practice professional nursing.
• Nursing is the act of utilizing the environment of the patient to assist him in his recovery, as defined by Florence Nightingale in 1860 - 1969.
• Nursing is assisting the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery, that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge, as defined by Dorothy Henderson in 1966.
• Nursing has developed its own codes of ethics and in most instances has set up means to monitor the professional behaviour of its members.