Professional Nursing Practice:

Craven and Hirnle, (2009) suggest that in general professions have a knowledge base and a collection of skills and values that distinguish one from another. Knowledge base, power and authority over training and education, registration, altruistic service, a code of ethics, lengthy socialisation and autonomy are the seven qualities that have been recognized as being the characteristics of a profession (McEwen & Wills, 2007).The question of whether nursing is a profession has been an ongoing debate. The need for higher education, a specific body of knowledge, increased public interest and responsibility and internal organisation are among several standards proposed to assess nursing’s professional status. As
It makes sense that if nurses claim they are caring professionals they are obliged to find out what nurse caring means to patients and how nurse can demonstrate care for patients. Evidence suggests that patients too view caring as a perceptible concept and highly value it as an essential and healing aspect of their professional encounters with nurse, however, it contrasts to the ways nurses view caring, reflection on what is known about patients attitudes to nurse caring suggests that above all patients want a nurse who demonstrates caring through clinical and technical competence, as well as through interpersonal skills and increasingly, a person who keeps them informed along each step of their illness trajectory, including informing family and friends.Care is most likely viewed by nurses as a resource to be allocated on basis of need rather than the ability to pay. These tensions are inherent in the working life of many nurses and compromise the ability of nurses to provide care in the way idealised by the profession. Caring is proclaimed and understood as the basis of modern nursing and nurses have produced vast amounts of literature