Transition Experience: From a Novice Nurse to a More Independent Registered Nurse

Transition Experience: From a Novice Nurse to a More Independent Registered Nurse
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Institutional Affiliation
Introduction
While the joy of every nursing graduate from a training institution is to secure job placement, the experience of transitioning from the student nurse to an experienced registered nurse determines career satisfaction and success. According to Woo and Newman (2019), there are three themes of transition experience that new nursing graduates are subjected to in their first jobs. These themes include personal transition, organizational transition, and professional transition experiences. Within the combination of these experiences, the novice nurses are in a position of identifying their various strengths and weaknesses as they work to achieve their objectives and outcomes after the transition. Like every novice nurse, I must have goals and objectives that will guide my preceptor in taking me through the transition period. For a successful transition from a novice nurse to an experienced registered nurse, there is a need for a close collaboration between the educational, health care sector, and other stakeholders such as regulatory boards to successfully examine and address factors that influence nursing transition experience to better support them for workforce readiness (Woo & Newnan, 2019). The preceptor will be able to guide me based on my strengths, weaknesses, and personal contributions. This paper addresses my transition journey after I received my nursing license and offered my first new graduate position in a hospital acute care setting.
Strengths, Weaknesses, and Personal Contributions
Introduction to practice nursing comes with challenges that will give a test to my strengths, weaknesses as well as personal contributions towards a successful transition. My understanding of these challenges is informed by the provisions of Duchscher's stages of transition theory which reflects the experiences of registered nursing transition into the workforce directly from the training institution (Ma., He, Zhao, Xu, & Liang, 2021). One of my strengths during this transition period is my ability to be a team player. As a nurse who is ambitious and nervous at the same time, the only way I can easily learn and restore my confidence is by being collaborative with other nurses as well as my preceptor. Being a team player makes me easily seek clarifications from my preceptor and also to learn better from other colleagues when my preceptor is not around. For instance, most preceptors are not relieved of their usual duties to give them time to be with novice nurses, and at times they do not work on weekends. So, when scheduled to work on a weekend and mostly my preceptor is on leave or is involved in her other duties, I would still learn from other nurses. My weakest time comes when I am forced to handle bullish colleagues over some time. There is so much that is expected from a novice nurse, and new graduate nurses might translate this as being bullied (Evans, Boxer & Sanber, 2008). Such experiences might result in novice nurses becoming demotivated to pursue their careers in nursing. Nonetheless, my responsibility is to focus on delivering on my duties and doing my best not to be distracted by any possible issues with my colleagues or patients. This will be possible if I focus on the positive remarks as well as ensure that I properly communicate with both my preceptor and patients. This will eliminate possible mistakes that may lead to me being referred to as an "inexperienced" nurse.
Goals and Objectives for My Role
For a successful transition, I must set goals and objectives. These will provide the guidelines for my preceptor. More importantly, it will be a mark of success if they are met. These goals and objectives are based on my understanding of the concept of goals of care (Stanek, 2017). Below are my five goals and objectives for my new role as a nurse.
Avoiding Medical Errors
I will formulate the right diagnosis for every patient to prevent medical errors and improve patient safety and outcomes. In medical practice, the selection of the right drug for the right patient is a basic goal for every practitioner (He, Liu & Ning, 2020). Every time I attend to a patient, I should be able to formulate the right diagnosis and, after that, seek feedback from my preceptor on the same. This feedback will act as my source of reference in formulating the subsequent similar diagnosis. This will ensure that by the end of my preceptorship, I will be able to formulate the right diagnosis for all the patients without the help of a preceptor.
Patient education
I will seek to educate every patient and their families about their disease and medication where applicable. To achieve this, I will ask every patient after my teaching to repeat to me so that I can ascertain that they got the right thing. However, it is important to note that there is a point at which patients have the "right not to know," and at the other end, they should know and understand the healing and medication that they are going through (Davies 2020). Through the help of my preceptor, I will be able to understand how to do it best and mostly without the help.
Pharmacological Knowledge
I will lea...