Attempting to Articulate the Everything of Registered Nursing

What do nurses do? I think this is a question that anyone going into nursing school needs to resarch before they accept their seat in a nursing program. I have to admit (I am fairly certain I have admitted this before) that I registered for the Bachelor of Nursing program in 2006 because I was kind of lost. I just returned to my parents house after a failed attempt at living in Vancouver. When I started the program I was not even sure I would ever practice. I did not feel like nursing was for me until close to completing my medical/surgical rotation in my second semester. This is when I started to understand that being a Registered Nurse was about more than simply completing list list of medical-type tasks. I do not think I fully appreciated the profession of nursing until I started graduate school. I do not think I fully understood the role of a mental health nurse until I started working as a mental health educator when I lived in Calgary in 2013 and this was probably mostly the result of working with the best mental health nurse that I have ever worked with. The sad reality was that I did not understand what my full scope of practice was until I was 6 years into my career.

Now that I have the privilege of being a Clinical Instructor for undergraduate Bachelor of Nursing Science students I feel like I am making it my mission to help them understand that nursing is more than a series of medical-type tasks.

Michelle D. 

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