In every issue of Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!, you'll find articles that are focused on student growth and development. This edition contains a wonderful and informative article on the nursing process. Although the target audience is nursing students, this article certainly has information that's valuable to all nurses at every level. The key isn't just the information on the nursing process but the Clinical Judgment Model. This key component is what often separates the novice nurse from the expert nurse: that is, the ability to use the nursing process in combination with the ability to perceive and digest subtle clues from your patient.
Take what you hear, see, and assess and combine that with the whole picture before you. This allows the nurse or student to place all the data together and prioritize what they find. This sounds much like critical thinking, because it is critical thinking: taking in the entire picture and setting up priorities and plans based on what's going on. The ability to take in the whole picture and not just target focus on one aspect of the individual before you is a skill that sharpens with time and effort.
The nursing process has become even more relevant for experienced nurses because our current environments are very focused on the electronic medical record, core measures, completion of checklists, and volumes of documentation. It's often easier to focus on the task at hand than to take a step back and look at what's going on with the whole patient. Staffing concerns and higher acuity levels make the critical thinking skillset more important than ever before.
Speaking of staffing levels and stressors present in our current work environments, I must mention a remarkable article in this edition titled "The power of hope." The author, Susan B. Fowler, PhD, shares her favorite definition of hope by Dufault and Martocchio: "a multidimensional dynamic life force characterized by a confident yet certain expectation of achieving good, which is realistically possible and personally significant." Using this definition of hope is what will sustain us when we want to give up-when we think we're defeated and can offer no more. Hope is what gives us the courage and strength to try again and again. Try to maintain focus on the knowledge that you chose not just a profession, but a calling; nursing's very foundations are embedded in hope. We are a source of hope for our patients, their families, and our communities. Our ability to share that hope is largely based on our faith and hope in ourselves as individuals and professionals.
Both of these articles are great examples of the diversity of content you'll find in every issue of Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! Be sure to read on for more great content in this issue of the journal. We hope you enjoy it! I know I will.