Professionalism In The Workplace: A Nursing Study

Professionalism in the workplace is a concept which every person defines differently, based on their own experiences and career history. In every workplace, you will find a variety of employees, who each have their own definition of professional conduct, and the field of nursing is no different. Throughout nursing history, there have been many attempts to elevate the status of nursing from just a mere job, into a full-fledged profession with all the requirements of specialized training, regulatory boards and standardized testing that entails. One example of this was seen in 1950, when the American Nurses Association established the Code for Professional Nurses, in an effort to define the roles and responsibilities of a nurse, to the public

Part of what defines a profession is that its members must undergo specialized training and possess a certain level of education, which provides them with a greater level of autonomy and control in their chosen line of work. A 2012 study examining the correlation between nurses’ ethical decision-making ability and their professional behaviors determined that “Competence, continued education, and professional autonomy is among the basic criteria of professionalism. Professional autonomy entails exercising the judgment of one’s own work using professional values and standards. Professional autonomy and competency are important as ethical decision-making will require independent reasoning and accountability. In this study, nurses lacking professional autonomy did not consider themselves active decision makers, a finding consistent with the literature.” (Cerit & Dinc, 2012, p. 209). According to the findings of this study, a lack of autonomy in the workplace produced nurses with fewer problem-solving skills who were not properly equipped to make decisions when faced with challenging ethical dilemmas. This is why I believe that when nurses are provided with greater autonomy in the workplace, they will have more opportunities to exercise their critical thinking skills and make ethical judgments. Overall, it appears that being provided with a reasonable amount of autonomy and independence in the workplace is

Overall, my definition of professional development in the workplace would focus on improving in the aforementioned areas. These concepts are not just applicable to nursing practice, but are universally applicable in any professional workplace environment, in order to promote and maintain a professional