The Maryland Nurse Practice Act states that a registered nurse graduate demonstrates accountability for maintaining professional practice standards in relation to holistic care across diverse settings, legal and ethical behaviors, and lifelong learning in accordance with the Maryland Practice Act (Maryland Board of Nursing, 2017). The Act sets the stage for what may be considered to be critical to the advancement of nursing as it highlights ethical and aesthetic issues as well as client needs in maintaining accountability and professional practice standards.
In terms of client needs, the nurse’s perception of the patient and the needs of a patient are highlighted as important aspects with respect to the reality of diversity in the Act. The Act calls for full awareness of the client’s culture to understand the meaning of the individual’s lived experience as well as taking into account the nursing situation in its entirety to provide holistic care. In terms of aesthetics, the Act emphasizes the need to have an authentic basis upon which nurses select and organize empirically based knowledge for use in each unique nursing situation. Aesthetics call for the nurse to understand how to ascertain nuances of meaning in a situation to transform a situation and apply transformative acts. In the ethical domain, the Act emphasizes accountability and adherence to standards with particular attention to the promotion and safeguarding the well-being and interest of clients (Maryland Board of Nursing, 2017). Fortunately, the nursing profession has standards, practices, and ethical codes that guide professional practice. In that regard, the Act is comprehensively crafted as it seeks to ensure that nurses understand and develop knowledge of the requirements for safe practice in the practice.
The Act is essential for the general nursing profession and in preparing competent nurses who may be able to effectively address underlying challenges faced in the practice. Personally, I feel that knowing a client holistically as a primary participant in the nursing process is essential in the provision of quality care that is patient-centered. Nurses attend to diverse patients and thus encounter unique nursing needs and unique nursing situations that cannot be duplicated exactly thus it can only be understood and managed in the moment. A holistic approach to client care gives room for the accentuation of a nurse to the dynamic nursing process and situations and appreciation of humans as the whole person in the nursing domain. It is also important to ensure that nurses understand their professional standards and ethical codes to understand how they relate to the client and how they approach their interaction during care provision. The Act is thus an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing practice and helps in identifying the areas that learners need to focus on and what they need to know to ensure they emerge competent (Bestable, 2014).
In terms of empirical knowing, study findings and nursing literature reviews suggest cultural competence and understanding the patients’ individual cultures are important in nursing practice and in the provision of holistic care. Literature review indicates that nurses with culturally specific data during care provision process are less likely to demonstrate negative attitudes, ethnocentrism, and stereotyping and instead emerge as co-participants with the patients in providing holistic care (Purnell, 2013). The Act provides a concrete basis for best practices within nursing by recommending evidence-based practice in academic and in clinical settings which are in line with the recommendations brought forward by studies and scholarly reviews. The use of evidence to guide practice decisions will inform the translation of knowledge into practice and focus on the merits or circumstances that define a client and the nursing situation to craft intervention strategies. This highlights the need to understand the client and their needs and nature of a situation by looking at factors such as the cultural background of individuals. This will help to deal with the complexities in decision-making as far as attending to diverse patients is concerned in the nursing practice field.
References
Bastable, S. B. (2014). Nurse as educator: Principles of teaching and learning for nursing practice (4th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.
Maryland Board of Nursing. (2017). Nurse Practice Act: Maryland Nurse Practice Act. Maryland.gov. Retrieved from http://mbon.maryland.gov/Pages/nurse-practice-act.aspx
Purnell, L. D. (2013). Transcultural health care: A culturally competent approach (4th ed.). Philadelphia: F. A. Davis.
