Name
Capella University
NURS_FPX6030
Instructor’s Name
October 8th, 2024
Practicum and Social Justice in Nursing
The practicum is a crucial aspect of the nursing curriculum as it helps prepare students for a transition from classroom learning to the real-life application of knowledge. But if we look at the practicum experience from a social justice perspective, then it has another significance. Social justice in nursing means that there is proper recognition of fair distribution of health care to the poor and the vulnerable (Boldt et al., 2021). Writing a reflection in the context of practicums, learners can observe and intervene in the sphere of injustice aetiologically related to healthcare. Through perceiving that bias, discrimination and unequal Healthcare distribution is a system, nursing students are in a better position to make changes towards a fair systemic Healthcare.
Understanding Practicum in Nursing
A practicum in nursing may be an essential part of nursing courses since it prepares the learner for the transition from classroom studies to the field. These clinical rotations entail the student being out of the classroom and practicing in actual healthcare facilities for example hospitals, community health centers, or clinics (Crawford et al., 2022). The practicum is one of the most effective learning modalities because it affords the students real-life experience with the licensed nurses or clinical instructors supervising them. The logical organization of such a rotation is useful in taking students beyond theoretical real-life case studies, and exposing them to actual patient care as it is experienced in various institutions.
The nursing practicum is a vital component of the nursing education process since it is the primary place where students should build up their clinical judgment by applying learned knowledge to choose the best course of action in responding to the patient’s symptoms, implementing selected interventions, and evaluating their outcomes (Crawford et al., 2022). Clinical judgment is especially hub for recognizing problems, defining diseases, and therapy approaches. For instance, a student working on a medical-surgical unit might take a patient’s temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate, as well as read through the patient’s labs and decide whether the present treatment is working or not. Indeed this particular skill acquired during the practicum becomes one of the blueprints of the future overall practice of nursing.
Effective communication also forms the core competence area that is underscored in the practicum setting. Students also know how to engage with patients, their families, and other healthcare practitioners. Effective interpersonal communication is vital while conveying a medical condition, a treatment regimen, or a procedure to a patient (Hartweg et al., 2022). Practicum experiences also involve understanding how to work with interprofessional teams with doctors, PHD, pharmacists, and social workers to provide comprehensive care. The way professionals manage the working relationships guarantees proper patient care because of its coordination.
Furthermore, during the practicum, the students receive an introduction to different areas of specialization in nursing for instance; pediatric, mental health, community, and medical/surgical nursing (Iriarte et al., 2020). Student gets exposure to different areas of patient care and different types of populations to develop holistic practice. For instance, in the pediatric setting, students could ignore milestones in development and possession of a strong family focus, and when working in the mental health field, they could deal with patients, who have psychological issues, learning how nurses manage both emotional and physical problems.
Social Justice in Nursing
Social justice in nursing calls for equitable circumstances and impartial distribution of health care to all persons regardless of their color, nationality, or standard of living. Nurses are all aware of their responsibility to promote diversity and equality in healthcare policy and its abolition when inequality exists (Koto et al., 2023). This includes striving for a day when every man, woman, and child across the globe has quality care, and no one is turned away from the doctor because of who they are.
Advocacy for Social Change
While definitions of social justice in nursing encompass direct patient advocacy for social change, it also encompasses lobbying for changes in laws and rules affecting healthcare. Nurses must dismantle or at least not perpetuate such structures as prejudice, and bigotry as well as the fair distribution of assets especially for populations of color, refugees, and the financially less privileged (Koto et al., 2023). When these problems are solved, the nurses minimize health inequalities and assist vulnerable populations to get the health they require. It also emphasizes the social determinants of health and acknowledges how they affect two major domains of patient health.
Lastly, addressing healthcare injustice in the healthcare system and fighting for reform is also nurses’ ethical responsibility. They are in a strategic place to establish variations in the management and treatment of sicknesses, and model a proper voice in the fight against impartiality in the documenting of illnesses and policies that cater to equal treatment of sicknesses in society (Patel et al., 2022). In this paper, they also outline how bias in health care is a major issue, and that nurses help to fight against this bias by standing up for the voiceless and identifying the structural factors that lead to health inequality in the first place.
Integration of Social Justice in Practicum Experiences
The students in the nursing programs can physically observe the disparities in health and how the features of social determinants of health impact patients during the practicum. Students have exposure to community health centers which may be in urban areas, other larger hospitals, and rural health clinics (Crawford et al., 2022). These places make them encounter other people who may at times struggle to get healthcare due to issues such as poor economic status, language barriers, or geographical isolation.
The students in nursing may develop insights into how systematic disparities can affect the patient’s health and the healthcare system in general from such instances. This is because people from low-income areas for instance are unable to afford to purchase prescription medicine or get preventive treatment, which may be detrimental to their health (Rudner, 2021). It enables students to meet the patient during their practicum placement whereby they can learn how to embrace and advocate for quality health care services. Another way through which students can become aware of health advocacy is when they engage health care practitioners to ensure fair treatment for all patients. The preceptors can help the students understand the biases of their treatments and facilitate conversations about strategies that would improve the health of minorities.
Role of Educators and Institutions
Nursing education and academic institutions are charged with the role of incorporating social justice into the practicum experiences. Due to this, nursing faculty have the responsibility of facilitating student incline toward understanding how social and economic factors influence health outcomes (Rudner, 2021). This way, practicum courses with references to social justice principles help educators teach students about existing patterns of inequality in healthcare. Such processes as writing a diary and group discussions can be used to ensure that the students show how disparities influence the overall care result of the patient.
Furthermore, schools and nursing programs can collaborate with other organizations that work closely with vulnerable communities. These partnerships provide service learning opportunities for students and involve work with such populations as migrant workers or homeless people, or any disadvantaged population (Slemon et al., 2024). The particular projects mentioned mean not only that the students get some experience of real health challenges but also that they become aware of social justice aspects of these challenges and develop an ability to address them. Nursing institutions should also make sure that their students at least during their practicum can deliver culturally appropriate care.
Challenges in Promoting Social Justice in Practicum
The effort to implement social justice for nursing practicums is not without attendant difficulties, with one of the biggest obstacles being the lack of sites for students in low-income or racially diverse areas (Rudner, 2021). When it becomes possible to assign genuine and meaningful situations, nursing students are provided with shielding communities that obscure the effects of social determinants of health, thus robbing students of the opportunity to learn about the differences in care as per the variability of the communities.
Such exemption from experiencing health inequalities makes them lack the skills they need to fight for fairness in health systems, and hence, they cannot address injustice as they work in clinical practice (Rudner, 2021). A second challenge is inadequate preparation of the preceptors who mentor students in their practice settings. Preceptors naturally supervise students in practicum placements, and if social justice is not on their curricular agenda, the practicum is wasted potential for teaching healthcare disparities and advocacy.
Implications for Nursing Practice
The major barriers to the effective implementation of social justice in nursing practicums are as follows: First, there are constraints in the number of practicum placements offered in low-income and diverse healthcare institutions (Slemon et al., 2024). That is why if nursing students are put in settings where there is no apparent health disparity, they fail to discover the practical implications of the social determinants of health. Such isolation from health disparities renders them inadequate qualifications in practice advocacy for equity in health care while they lack the experience to address unfairness in health systems as they join the practice field.
Another essential issue is a lack of sufficient preparation for preceptors who supervise students during their practicum placements (Koto et al., 2023). While preceptors are very important in the training of nursing students, where the preceptor does not have training on social justice issues he can easily turn the practicum into a wasted opportunity to teach about the inequalities within the health care system. Lack of appreciation of equality in the treatment of patients makes students fail to see the need to fight for all patients especially the vulnerable ones, a dogma of nursing.
NURS FPX 6025 Assessment 5 Conclusion
In addition, various institutional challenges defeat the likelihood of enshrining the social justice principles in the nursing education systems. Few nursing curricula provide appropriate time and required material to discuss social justice and many faculties approach it as an elective rather than as a substantial component of nursing practice (Slemon et al., 2024). This lack of emphasis means that graduates cannot confront health inequities in their working practice. To train nurses for the future healthcare system, addressing social justice must become an important element in the clinical preparation of nurse education.
NURS FPX 6025 Assessment 5 References
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Crawford, D., Jacobson, D., & McCarthy, M. (2022). Impact of a social justice course in graduate nursing education. Nurse Educator, 47(4), 241–245. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000001152
Hartweg, D. L., & Metcalfe, S. A. (2022). Orem’s self-care deficit nursing theory: Relevance and need for refinement. Nursing Science Quarterly, 35(1), 70–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/08943184211051369
Iriarte, A., Lopez, O., Mujika, A., Ruiz, C., Hernantes, N., Bermejo, E., & Pumar, M. J. (2020). Nurses’ role in health promotion and prevention: A critical interpretive synthesis. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 29(21-22), 3937–3949. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.15441
Koto, K., Carandang, R. R., Shibanuma, A., Kiriya, J., Ong, K. I. C., Touch, S., Koy, V., & Jimba, M. (2023). Understanding competency of nursing students in the course of case-based learning in Cambodia: a convergent mixed method study. BMC Nursing, 22(1), 265. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-023-01420-8
Patel, K. M., & Metersky, K. (2022). Reflective practice in nursing: A concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Knowledge, 33(3), 180–187. https://doi.org/10.1111/2047-3095.12350
Rudner, N. (2021). Nursing is a health equity and social justice movement. Public Health Nursing, 38(4), 687–691. https://doi.org/10.1111/phn.12905
Slemon, A., Dhari, S., Christie, T., & Aubrey, G. (2024). ‘There is no justice in nursing school’: A qualitative analysis of nursing students’ experiences of discrimination shared on Reddit. Journal of Advanced Nursing, https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.16066
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