Now the quest for a job that will be the foundation of a career is underway, as graduates prepare their schedules to write the NCLex and proofread their resumes for any additional info needed.
A few pearls for the soon-to-be novice nurses: please be pragmatic about your skills, consider your strengths, and plan to enrich the experiences in areas where you are not yet competent. See, you will graduate, having met your coursework and clinical hours requirements across a range of settings, and your parchment/graduation diploma is an invitation to join the healthcare team.
On your resume for any of the clinical rotations, it will be more helpful to specify what competencies you achieved–communication is an overarching competency present in the tapestry of your practice. Critical thinking and clinical judgment are key indices of your potential success and specific examples of how you recognized or gained increased awareness of an escalating patient event. What you did to intervene, what you accessed to learn from the event and how you engaged in debriefing to reflect on the patient’s care. Additionally, whatever the outcome, you maintained a nurse-patient therapeutic relationship, professionalism, and self-care.
The competencies are the framework that takes a compassionate, kind, strong individual and transforms them into a quality-of-care, safety sentinel, and interventionist for a wide range of conditions and environments, combined with accountability, integrity, and empathy. The novice nurse can navigate using a toolkit brimming with strategies, case studies, and a mindset for delivering excellent nursing care. Notwithstanding the importance of preceptors, mentors, and the family and friends who need to ensure their nurse is cared for, encouraged, and supported.
Drafting a resume that contains expertise in everything is not going to help the Human Resources screening staff, nor will it help the manager who interviews you. The questions will provide a means of assessing your strengths, your ability to be a team player, how you manage conflict, and your critical thinking by asking how you would manage a clinical scenario.
A patient presents with shortness of breath and a heavy sensation in their chest. What steps would you take?
A patient is found on the floor by the washroom. What steps would you take?
A nurse enters the medication rooom, shouting how unreasonabe the patients are, using profanity, and throws a syringe across the room, what steps would you take?
All these scenarios need an assessment phase, i.e. respiratory rate, level of consciousness, pain scale, along with the history of the patients, what are their admitting issues, what are the co-morbidities, code status, and the ability to focus on a specific patient one at a time. Multi-tasking is used; it is actually about constantly prioritizing needs, so eliminate that myth.
The team member having a tantrum is a professional moment: do you leave the medication room, do you stand and listen, how do you navigate the verbal and physical actions that contribute to team dynamics, social expectations, and, dare I say, incivility to bullying behaviour?
The novice nurse will be prepared for the interview, knowing a few items about the organization, including the mission statement, how busy the clinical organization is, and all accessible through websites that contain annual reports, infection rates, accreditation status, and more.
Consider entering into a contract to establish a record in an organization; it’s a trial period for both you and the employer. Know this, time flies, and my 4 decades feel like they whizzed by. Namaste and good luck!
Categories: Uncategorized
Paula M
Retired Registered Nurse (Non-practicing) Storyteller, Healer, Scribe, Transformational Leader
Life of a Nurse 
Leave a comment