Question

As a health care professional, you may be placed in a position where you will be asked to disclose patient information to law enforcement or a government agency. As a manager, you must also educate your staff to handle these situations with professionalism and confidence.

Create an infographic using www.Piktochart.com, or a similar program.

• Your audience is employees within your department.
• Your goal is to educate your staff to understand what is allowable, and what is not when requests for patient information are made by law enforcement or government agency officials.
• Your infographic should represent the flow of an interaction between an employee and an official, including text and graphic representations of your key points.
• Save your completed infographic as either a .jpg or .png, and ensure all text is readable.
• A minimum of three references should be listed at the bottom of your completed document.
• Submit the infographic as a .jpg file.

Answer 1

The profession is defined as a “chosen, paid occupation requiring prolonged training and formal qualification” (Meriam-Webster, 2017).

professionals are practitioners who are expected to display competence and skills in their roles. Professionalism is considered a paramount of success in the career of a nurse.

As a nurse manager, we have to educate and counsel the other clinical staff to manage and handle every situation.

*Maintain a constant, high quality of care

Patients expect to receive good care from the nurses at all times. Such expectations reflect their confidence in the nurse’s capabilities of providing a high standard of care as a professional. Therefore, a professional nurse should deliver the best possible care at all times to all patients irrespective of the patient’s background and their condition. All nursing-related procedures must align with the current standards of nursing practices, and subsequently improve following new research and evidence-based practices, to ensure that the nurse can consistently deliver a high quality of care. A professional nurse must also be dedicated to their duties, to deliver their care with justice, honesty, integrity, and respect to every single patient (RNAO, 2007).

*Lifelong learning attitude to improve knowledge and skills

Nursing is a career which provides great opportunities for nurses to keep on learning and to improve their knowledge and skills. Due to the diverse number of tasks they perform, nurses have many clinical experiences which they can learn from to advance their various competencies. To further enhance their professionalism, nurses should take the chance to politely ask the senior staff, whenever they are available, to guide and teach them when they are not confident in performing some of the duties. Nurses should adopt a lifelong learning attitude in the pursuit of professionalism in their careers, and always strive to provide the best care to their patients.

Maintain patient’s confidentiality at all times

A professional nurse should also seek to safeguard the patient’s confidentiality at all times, and not take any actions that can undermine their rights and privacy. Nurses who demonstrate their ability to maintain the patient’s privacy are also more likely to be trusted by the patients and build a stronger nurse-patient relationship. Some ways that a nurse can help to maintain the patient’s confidentiality is to ensure that their medical records are kept safely in the appropriate place, such as closing the computer screen showing the patient’s diagnostic results or restrict the excessive printing of health information from computers.

Nurses can also remind their colleagues to return the medical records to their appropriate places. If a nurse hears a conversation between healthcare professionals that mention some of the patients’ names, the nurse should also politely ask them to discontinue their discussion and respect the patient’s right to confidentiality.

Ability to collaborate and contribute to teamwork

Nurses are a part of a multidisciplinary healthcare team. Effective teamwork is not restricted to working with other nurses, but also with the rest of their colleagues in the healthcare community, from doctors to administrators. Healthcare professionals have to work together to deliver optimal care to patients and better their outcomes. By contributing to great teamwork, the nurse will demonstrate a spirit of collaboration and flexibility that is crucial to the development of professionalism in the healthcare sector.

Thus, developing professionalism in their career will require nurses to look beyond their individual capabilities and contemplate how they can contribute to the healthcare team on the whole, and to work seamlessly with other healthcare professionals when the situation calls for it.

Overall, delivering and maintaining a high standard of care is the key to developing and sustaining the professionalism of the nurse. Nurses can improve their professionalism through means such as adopting a lifelong learning attitude, preserving the patient’s confidentiality and enhancing their teamwork. Apart from these means, it is also important for nurses to conduct themselves in a way that reflects the profession positively, so as not to tarnish the image of nurses built up by predecessors.

Lifelong Maintain a constant, high quality of care attitude to improve knowledge and skills Maintain patient's confidentiality at all times Ability to collaborate and contribute to teamwork