NURS 6002 Week 11 Philosophy and Goals Revision Example

Revising My Philosophy of Nursing and Five-Year Goals at the End of the Term

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 6002: Perspectives on Graduate Study

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Revising My Philosophy of Nursing and Five-Year Goals at the End of the Term

Early in this course I wrote a philosophy of nursing and a five-year goal statement. This paper revises both. Three influences shaped the revisions: the course readings, my new membership in a professional organization, and three conversations with a nurse practitioner mentor I met through that organization. The reasoning follows the three reflective questions of Driscoll (2007): what happened, so what does it mean, and now what will I do.

Philosophy: Original and Revised

Table 1

Philosophy Sentences Before and After Revision

Goals: Original and Revised

Table 2

Goal Statements Before and After Revision

One goal narrowed and one moved later. The practice goal narrowed from primary care in general to rural chronic disease care. The quality project moved from year one to year three.

What Changed

The philosophy changed mostly in its account of health and environment. My first draft treated health as the absence of disease and the environment as the hospital room, which is how a medical-surgical nurse sees the world from the bedside. The goals changed in focus and timing. My first draft named primary care in general and put a quality project in my first year.

So What

Two influences explain the changes. The course's readings on nursing's metaparadigm pushed me to define health and environment in terms that fit people living with chronic illness outside the hospital, which is where I intend to practice. My mentor, a nurse practitioner in a rural clinic, told me that her first year as a provider was consumed by learning to make decisions alone, and that she would not have been ready to lead improvement work until her third year. Her account moved the quality project later. Rural practices have been relying more and more on nurse practitioners (Barnes et al., 2018), and hearing one describe that work made my goal concrete enough to narrow.

These changes matter for my practice now, not only later. If health is the capacity to live as a person values, then my discharge teaching should start from what the patient wants to be able to do, and I have begun asking that question on my unit.

Now What

I will do three things differently. I will choose practicum placements in rural clinics wherever possible, to test the narrowed goal early. I will keep a short log of decisions I find hard as a nurse, as practice for the provider role my mentor described. And I will revisit both documents at the end of each program year, using the same three questions.

The Belief I Kept

One belief stands exactly as I first wrote it: patient refusal deserves respect. The term tested it. A reading on ethics asked whether respecting refusal can become an excuse for not trying to persuade, and in one shift this term I cared for a man whose refusal of dialysis troubled the whole team. What I concluded is that respecting refusal does not mean staying silent; it means making sure the person understands, then honoring what they decide. The ANA Code of Ethics supports that position by grounding nursing in respect for each person's dignity and right to self-determination (American Nurses Association, 2015). The belief held, so I kept it.

Appendices

Appendix A: Revised philosophy of nursing in full. Appendix B: Revised five-year goal statement in full. Both are attached to the submitted paper.

References

American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. Nursesbooks.org.

Barnes, H., Richards, M. R., McHugh, M. D., & Martsolf, G. (2018). Rural and nonrural primary care physician practices increasingly rely on nurse practitioners. Health Affairs, 37(6), 908-914. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1158

Driscoll, J. (2007). Practising clinical supervision: A reflective approach for healthcare professionals (2nd ed.). Baillière Tindall Elsevier.