The American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) document, It’s All About You: A Blueprint for Influencing Practice (2002), speaks directly to nurses’ potential. It describes and explains the need for five key areas of personal strengths in order to grow in the art and skill of nursing: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills. This is assuming a base-line level of competence, and thus registration with a college of nurses. The purpose of the document is to address growth in critical care nurses (involving an advanced level of skill). Regardless of the targeted nurse population, the advice the AACN offers for bolstering nurses’ growth in their potentials is applicable to nursing students, as well.
Throughout the document, very specific, action words or behaviours are listed that guide nurses in developing values, skills and characteristics that will improve their ability to think, behave and perform as a professional nurse. These action words are objective ways to measure a nurse’s progress and growth. The comparative aspect could be supervisory feedback “as a novice nurse” versus feedback as a veteran nurse, especially if the same competencies are used in the ‘marking rubric’ for those evaluations.
It seems that well defined competencies provide an objective basis for measuring nurses’ growth in all three domains of nursing. This document supports my posed question that objective measurement is possible to measure nurses' growth cognitively, performatively and affectively.
Reference: AACN (2002). It’s All About You: A Blueprint for Influencing Practice, The American Association of Critical Care Nurses, Aliso Veijo , CA
It is good that that you were able to reference the AACN document Brenda. It sounds like it can be a useful document for reference and your inquiry. I'm curious as to what the action words are and how they are cross-referenced to the five personal strengths. How might these action words reflect objective ways to measure progress and growth? Are these similar to the action words we use to write learning outcomes? I'm also interested in the assumption underlying the base-line level of competence.
ReplyDeleteHi Brenda,
ReplyDeleteThank-you for your post. I was interested in the part about personal strengths, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills. You spoke of well-defined competencies and related them to values skills and characteristics. I was uncertain about the link from that to your statement that objective measurement was possible to measure nurses growth cognitively, performatively and affectively. Having attended class last night and hearing you clarify that, for other reasons, you no longer are taking that position seems to make more sense to me.
Beth