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The professional role of the nurse
When you have completed this chapter you should:
• understand what is meant by ‘professional role’
• understand the meaning of accountability, responsibility and duty of care
• have an awareness of your role, including expectations and limitations
• have an understanding of legal and professional principles
• have an awareness of legal, ethical and professional issues in medicines management
Answer the following and begin reflecting on what it is to be a nurse.
1. What are three characteristics you possess that are important to being a nurse?
2. What does ‘professional’ mean to you?
3. Define ‘responsible’.
4. What is it to be accountable?
5. Do you think responsibility and accountability are different?
6. Think of a limitation you have now, in your current year of study as a student nurse or in your role as a nurse.
7. What are three expectations the patient has of the nurse caring for them?
8. Are nurses legally accountable?
Welcome to medicines management – a term that is often misunderstood and unclear, but which has a powerful impact on nursing and the health care profession.
Let us start by trying to understand what nursing is. It is the promotion of health and well-being, which, although a useful phrase, throws up a lot of questions and ethical issues for nurses and health care professionals. Our duty as nurses is not to harm our patients. Patients in our care trust us with their health and well-being. Therefore, nurses undertake an enormous responsibility in caring for people and protecting them from harm and helping them to get better. But is that all we do? This highlights the importance of belonging to a ‘profession’.
The key terms ‘professional accountability’ and ‘professional behaviour’ stem from the standards of care that encompass ‘professionalism’. So, a good starting point to understanding what it is that nurses do and what they are is to consider how one respects others and their autonomy.
If you were a patient (or have been) how would you want to be treated by health care professionals?
Do you have an expectation of the treatment and care you will receive?
What is important in regard to ‘your autonomy’?
This raises moral, legal and ethical dilemmas and makes up fundamental aspects of the professional dimension. By reflecting on what and how nurses relate to their patients/clients, and indeed the public, gives rise to one’s professionalism and indeed one’s accountability.
Being a professional is therefore about the way in which we act, as it relates to issues of morality, ethics and law. Professions establish themselves through regulation and formal legislation, as a means of protection for the public and to ensure safe standards of care. Therefore, being professional is about being proficient, skilled, trained and practised. It allows one to be specialised or considered an expert in something. It is about being licensed or certified. It is a status; one of high regard wherein professional practice is recognised, maintained, monitored and safeguarded.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council
For nurses, this professional status requires registration with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), whose purpose is to ensure that registrants have met the requirements and standards set by the Council through education and training. It means that the registrants can demonstrate and maintain these standards in their practice.
Access the NMC website at www.nmc-uk.org Search the site to identify what the NMC is, its function and its purpose.
The NMC Code is the foundation of good nursing and midwifery practice, and a key tool in safeguarding the health and well-being of the public (NMC, 2008a). This would have come up in your search and it is a vital document providing guidance and standards that nurses must adhere to and demonstrate in their patient care. Protecting the public is of the highest importance and, as a result, nurses must demonstrate safe and effective care at all times.
The Council’s main function is to set standards ...
