Introduction
Incorporating practical experiences into large-scale professional development plans is essential in postgraduate education. Identifying the various applications of knowledge is also central to exploring the research-to-practice continuum. To instrumentalize practicum experiences in urgent care at the University of Maryland for working on the evidence-based project and development as a leader and scholar-practitioner, I intend to rely on observation, communication with stakeholders, and takeaways from complex cases.
Project Implementation, Evaluation, and Dissemination
Practicum experiences, in particular, direct communication with the urgent care nursing workforce or managers and encounters with the specifics of emotional workloads, can be instrumentalized and accounted for to continue working on the evidence-based project. In urgent care, compassion fatigue (CF), being among the multidimensional psychological phenomena, involves prolonged exposure to stress-inducing situations requiring witnessing suffering (Borges et al., 2019). It implies that exploring urgent care nurses’ emotional changes, especially in recent graduates, should involve lengthy observations, and the practicum will directly support this research need and facilitate the selection of CF prevention interventions, thus prompting project implementation. Concerning the evaluation component, the practice setting can offer first-hand experiences with how CF develops sporadically, thus enabling me as a researcher to incorporate personal communication and subjective experiences, aside from statistical inferences, into post-intervention assessment endeavors. I will also make experiential gains linked with the practicum site helpful for dissemination by exploring the financial and culture-related feasibility of CF prevention programs as perceived by chief decision-makers at urgent care facilities and using this increased professional network as a data dissemination channel. Therefore, observations and personal encounters will support CF-focused project-based activity.
Development as a Scholar-Practitioner
Practice in an urgent care setting that is part of the University of Maryland medical system can effectively promote growth as a scholar-practitioner by fostering the identification of theory-practice gaps in this care context. The practitioner-scholar model of advanced education centers on the professional’s ability to translate scholarly knowledge into tangible improvements while also offering opportunities for self-renewal and fostering more robust connections between scholarship and practice (Nguyen et al., 2019; Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2018). I will use the practice of alleviating rapid-onset conditions and injuries of various etiologies, along with assuming a role in the organizational hierarchy and applying the pre-existing supervisory skills, to promote the further identification of urgent care nurses’ psychological and resource-related barriers to excellence that remain unaddressed in the scientific literature. In this manner, by fostering innovative takeaways and suggesting topics for scientific inquiry, experiences at the practicum site will be converted into opportunities to explore the theory-practice gap.
Continued Development as a Nurse Leader
I intend to use practice at the selected site as the means for following the advanced practice nursing pathway and pursuing a leader’s role. In nursing care, fulfilling one’s potential for leadership is inseparable from professionalism and developing an adequate decision-making capacity as an individual provider (Sahay et al., 2022). As a team member, I will learn from frequent encounters with urgent care patients having complex medical needs and, sometimes, peculiar psychological need profiles and distress resulting from traumatic injuries, thus prioritizing the exploration of holistic care and care evaluation as the learning objectives. These takeaways from practice will promote gaining a more detailed comprehension of optimal task distribution patterns and aspects of care and psychological support to highlight in new nurse education, especially with regards to caring for underage patients. If processed accurately and without excessive extrapolation, such insights will promote growth as a leader and prepare me for supervising care effectively.
Conclusion
On a final note, the upcoming practicum experience will offer the means for further research and influencing the field by research gap identification and exploring the hypothetical missing components of novice practitioner education. Engaging in care and teamwork activities at the specified site can provide tremendous informational support and an array of intellectual nourishment opportunities. Approaching each opportunity for learning with the necessary concentration will be central to continued self-directed growth.
References
Borges, E. M. D. N., Fonseca, C. I. N. D. S., Baptista, P. C. P., QueirĂłs, C. M. L., Baldonedo-Mosteiro, M., & Mosteiro-Diaz, M. P. (2019). Compassion fatigue among nurses working on an adult emergency and urgent care unit. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 27, 1-6. Web.
Nguyen, D. J., Mathuews, K., Herron, A., Troyer, R., Graman, Z., Goode, W. A., Shultz, A., Tackett, K., & Moss, M. (2019). Learning to become a scholar-practitioner through research experiences.Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 56(4), 365-378. Web.
Rockinson-Szapkiw, A. (2018). The development and validation of the scholar–practitioner research development scale for students enrolled in professional doctoral programs.Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 10(4), 478-492. Web.
Sahay, A., Willis, E., Kerr, D., & Rasmussen, B. (2022). Nurse leader agency: Creating an environment conducive to support for graduate nurses.Journal of Nursing Management, 30(3), 643-650. Web.