Professional Identity In Nursing

Introduction
Nursing has two phases. To the public, nurses embody the best of modern heath care. Efficient, effective and caring nurses are at the centre of the patient’s experience. The other phase largely invisible to the patient, even though it has been a part of nursing since the time of Florence Nightingale (Risjord, 2010). Twenty-first-century nursing changed significantly from Nightingale’s era of nursing. Nurses were trained as apprentices in the first century of nursing and worked long hours in bedside and gained a little knowledge, dispensed by Physicians. It became clear that effective nursing practice requires a distinctive body of knowledge by the middle of the twentieth century. Nurses developed professionalism and nursing identity

A person’s professional identity is a sense of self that is derived and perceived from the role we take on in the work that we do (Johnson et al, 2012). A good professional identity comprises a blend of education, training, and personality which builds a successful career. Nursing professional identity shaped through the values beliefs and attitudes which reinforce the professional behaviour of a nurse and interaction with the patients. Nurses professional identity is defined as the values and beliefs held by the nurse that guide his/her thinking action and interaction with patient

Nurses developed professionalism with prodigious knowledge, however public does not always price the services and capability that nurses have learned through education and innovation. The actual public image of nursing is varied and incongruous. The public appears to have little awareness of what nurses actually do and what actually a nurse is (Morris et al, 2011). What public think about nurses and nursing profession will really boost our self-image. The professional parts of the work remain invisible to media as a result of leading positions of the medical profession. Florence Nightingale saw nursing as an independent profession that was not subordinate but equal to the medical profession (Nightingale