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The Health Care Workforce As A Registered Nurse Essay

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Increased accountability and responsibility is my main fear as I enter the health care workforce as a registered nurse. Over the last three years as a student nurse on clinical placement, every shift I was supervised and overlooked by a registered nurse at all times. As well as being provided a diverse range of advice and techniques to use when applying my nursing practice. As a nursing student it gave me room for minor errors, as I always had someone to correct it and demonstrate efficient practice. Yet knowing next year I will have to carry the responsibilities of a nurse independently puts a different perspective on my year ahead. A registered nurse is accountable and responsible for their own actions and distribution of care to enrolled nurses and a number of other health care workers (Nursing Midwifery Board of Australia, 2006). According to a Nursing Times paper, accountability and responsibility is a key stressor in transitioning from a graduate nurse to a fully qualified nurse (Whitehead and Holmes 2011). Being ethically and legally responsible for another human being, was recognized as an overwhelming and ‘extremely scary’ experience. Specifically, graduate nurses fear the lack of recognising a deteriorating patient as a result of ‘overlooking something’ important (Goh and Watt 2003). Therefore, this stress and uncertainty in their practice may lead to a number of unfortunate events occurring and put patient’s safety at risk, due to the degree of responsibility and

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