Top Qualities That Make a Great Healthcare Practitioner

Nursing is steadily becoming a preferred career path for many, as the aspiration of becoming a certified and registered nurse continues to rise.

For those who would like to become a nurse, it is worth noting that few career paths offer as many rewards as nursing. Thus, you should feel confident that you are not only making the right career choice but also once you complete a nursing educational program, you will be able to contribute towards the betterment of society by providing health care services to those who need them the most.

Why You Should be a Nurse

Some of the perks of working as a nurse, just to name but a few, include an opportunity for fast career advancement, flexible working opportunities, and the chance to bring about change in patients’ lives.

Imagine if you were working as a registered nurse during the pandemic? How many lives you would have had an opportunity to impact?

There’s nothing as fulfilling as knowing you were able to contribute towards making a patient smile, through your collaboration with other medical professionals such as doctors.

A Demanding but Fulfilling Job

Despite the numerous advantages of pursuing a nursing health care career program, aspiring nursing students need to comprehend that it is not a walk in the park.

Nursing presents its own share of challenges and students should be aware of the fact that once they complete their nursing education, they will be working in a demanding job.

Bearing that in mind, there are some key qualities and traits that all aspiring nurses and health care practitioners need to possess before opting to join BSN to DNP online programs.

Having these qualities and traits will help ensure that you have a successful nursing career without feeling overwhelmed or burned out due to job-related stress.

If you are an aspiring nurse who has been researching to find out some of the attributes and qualities that nurses should have to enjoy a blissful nursing health care career, then this guide will aid in enlightening you on some preferred nursing traits.

Hopefully, you will be able to assess your skillset and decide whether pursuing a health care career path is something that would grant you a sense of satisfaction, or would you rather choose a different career that will be more suitable to your personality and character traits.

• Empathy

Empathy is where a person is able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and experience whatever they may be experiencing at a particular point in time.

In the context of nursing professionals, it entails their ability to sympathize with their patients and experience whatever they may be experiencing at a given point in time.

Whenever patients are laying on hospital beds, ringing frequently for assistance from nurses, only to watch as nurses bypass their beds, they won’t perceive that the health care practitioners could be attending to other patients who may be in greater need at that given time.

All their minds fathoms are that nurses don’t care about their well-being and their needs are not a priority to the nurses.

In as much as working as a nurse can be hectic, you should strive to take a moment to reassure patients that have not been attended to. That assistance is on the way, and they shouldn’t feel ignored.

You may not be aware of the impact of reassuring patients; however, it contributes towards building a solid bond and level of trust between you and them. It also aids in making the hospital experience of nurses memorable.

As a nurse, you need to comprehend that you will be handling patients from diverse backgrounds, who have varied personalities and character traits.

You will need to be capable of pre-empting patient needs with utmost accuracy and responds to the emotional needs of patients. To carry this out successfully, empathy is a vital skill that you must have ingrained within you.

Despite the fact that not everyone will be empathetic from the get-go, it is a trait that can be impacted by someone through the mode of teaching.

Nursing educators have understood this and go to great lengths to ensure that they instill this vital character trait in nursing students.

• Emotional Stability

Before you make the choice to pursue a nursing career, you need to comprehend one aspect of the nursing career, and that is nursing is a demanding job. No consecutive days are the same in the nursing profession. There will be days where the job will evoke emotions of joy, and others where you will experience pensiveness and despair.

If you don’t possess the ability to optimally control your emotions, you can easily break down and crumble at any moment should one emotion overpower another.

Strong emotional stability is important, as part of a nurse’s job is to provide support and assistance to other nursing colleagues as well as patients, together with the wants and needs patients’ family members.

It is vital that a nurse is capable of conducting themselves with the utmost professionalism whenever they come across challenging work experiences.

This is not to suggest that nurses should not showcase their emotions and become cold and unresponsive when faced with challenging circumstances.

Absolutely not – part of being a human is having and showing emotion and compassion towards your fellow human beings.

You aren’t a robot, so the aspect of having emotional stability shouldn’t be confused with lacking or inadequate empathy.

All it means is that for nurses to be able to provide excellent medical services and care to the patients that they serve, they must be able to stay focused and fulfill all assigned nursing responsibilities.

Research findings have shown that nurses who are able to control their emotions are able to solve difficult problems, provide their patients with all the medical care and attention that they need, and concentrate on their nursing tasks with ease.

Nurses need not get frustrated should they not have a strong ability to maintain their emotional stability, since like empathy, it is a skill that can be learned; all that is needed is the practice of mindfulness.

• Communication Skills

The ability to eloquently articulate yourself either verbally or in writing is one of the key attributes for health care practitioners and all aspiring nurses.

Nurses act as a liaison between doctors, patients, therapists, and family members of the patient, this is because part of the job of being a nurse is to constantly convey information between the aforementioned parties.

In the scenario where a nurse relays inaccurate information, it may result in detrimental outcomes.

Errors arising from wrongly transcribing medical orders, omitting key information relating to a patient’s paperwork, and also failing to include allergies that a patient may be ailing from are some of the mistakes often made as a result of poor communication.

To help lessen the possibility of causing harm to a patient, nurses need to learn to communicate efficiently.

They need to be able to read, write, and present information to the relevant parties verbally.

It is also worth noting that communication is an important tool that nurses can utilize to help build a strong bond and lasting relationships with their clients.

Nurses with excellent interpersonal skills can contribute towards helping their patients make a prompt recovery and even make them feel more comfortable and relaxed.

Conversing and being friendly with patients can also aid in helping eradicate anxiety that some patients may have, making it easy for them to voice and share their concerns.

This can result in better diagnosis, resulting in an improved outcome on the client’s part.

All nurses should be able to freely share information proactively without waiting for their patients to ask them questions. Learn to grant your patients the floor to enable them to tell you freely about what may be disturbing their peace of mind. This will help them get comfortable and it can aid in building a sense of trust.

• A Strong Yearning to Learn

Before you can be entrusted with the life of a fellow human being, you need to prove your health care skills.

Thus, nurses need to undergo adequate training that will empower them to be certified, and registered.

Whenever nursing students graduate from nursing schools, the majority of the knowledge they possess is theoretical.

More often than not, they may lack actual nursing experience and this means that they need to be guided through various nursing principles and procedures before they can go about their nursing responsibilities on their own.

Specifically, specialized nursing fields such as emergency medicine, infusion therapy, and critical care.

Graduates need to be actively supervised by experienced nursing colleagues to help guide and teach the young nursing graduates through various avenues such as mentorship and preceptorship opportunities.

In cases where a graduate nurse may not be conversant with the ongoings, they are encouraged to consult experienced nurses so as to help make informed medical decisions pertaining to the life of their patients.

Nursing is an ever-changing and dynamic field. Learning never stops.

Thus, in order to become an exceptional nurse, you need to adopt the mindset that you will forever be a student, and a lot will be demanded from you, as far as keeping up with the changes taking place in the nursing field are concerned.

• Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to draw objective conclusions after observing all the presented facts and figures.

It is a self-directed and disciplined approach that empowers nurses to interpret information and data pertaining to their patient’s needs.

Nurses who have good critical thinking skills are capable of solving complicated medical conditions accurately and easily. Despite nurses working as part of a larger health care team in a hospital facility, their ability to make informed decisions linked to their clients is autonomous.

The work environment in any health care facility is often one riddled with high job pressure and stressful circumstances. So, possessing the ability to swiftly think on your feet can come in handy in helping you cope.

In as much as critical thinking comes naturally to some, you will be pleased to know that it is also an attribute that you can teach yourself, both in schooling institutions and on the job.

• Versatility

Like any other working field, you wouldn’t want to come to the realization that you will be required to pull in a graveyard shift, labor during the holidays, or work overtime without having been asked first.

It is paramount, irrespective of one’s career profession, to ensure that you are maintaining a healthy job and work-life balance.

Constantly working can lead to burnout and if you don’t take leave days or a couple of days off. They may start suffering from job-related stress.

Nevertheless, you need to understand that emergencies tend to occur whenever you are working within a health care facility such as a hospital.

In scenarios like those, you will be mandated to report to duty to help save patient lives.

However, you always have the option of speaking to your nursing supervisor regarding off days that can be taken within your workweek to help you get to rest and maintain a social life.

As a nurse, you can determine your own fate by opting to work in a suitable medical facility that matches your lifestyle requirements.

• Respectfulness

It is paramount that nurses show respect when dealing with their clients.

It is a way of showcasing professional courtesy, and it must be showcased to all patients that a nurse deals with irrespective of their behavioral patterns and attitudes.

It is important to note that working in certain professions may impact your personality, and the health care profession is not an exception. Aspiring nursing students looking to venture into the nursing career path need to understand that it is paramount to respect all nursing rules and medical guidelines.