The Importance of Community Service Experience in The Career of a Professional Nurse

According to Patricia Benner, (1996) the role of intuition is very crucial to understanding the nursing expertise from the community experience. According to the Rolfe Reflective Model that is based on three very simple questions, it focuses on someone asking themselves some questions that contribute to their success. Here, it is the success of being registered as a professional nurse through my community experience am putting into emphasizes (Benner, P., Tanner, C., Chesla, C., 2011). The three questions posed by the Rolfe Reflective Model are, What? So What? Now What? Answering the questions (what?) helps a nurse to structure the reflections that are essential for the nurse to be registered. These gears one towards becoming a professional nurse who can be registered. All the questions mentioned above entailed in answering makes it simple for the student nurse to develop and grow to become eligible for registering as professional nurse. Someone usually gets experience due to them passing through various conditions where in some we succeed and in some we fail. But in all the situations whether positive or adverse, there is something that one learns out of it (De Groot, 2012).

For example, being a nurse involves seeing many cases where even in some manner some patients die while in our care. These occur regardless of whether we are doing everything to make sure that the patient recovers. But we should have our lessons to learn from every situation and to ensure that we improve the handling of the situation if it occurs again. That is what the Rolfe Reflective Model concentrates upon (Dreyfus, H.L., Dreyfus, S.E., 2009). These helps us to correct the mistakes that one do as a nurse and improve our community and the care for our patients (Effken, J.A., 2001). However, one of the barriers to reflecting is time. Time is the scarcest commodity that usually limits the nurse ability for reflective practice in the community. The time is never enough for the nurses since they are committed to more duties.

Patricia Benner’s influential theory proposes that the journey from novice to becoming an expert nurse mainly encompasses five stages of the community experience (Benner, P., Tanner, C., Chesla, C., 1992). In the novice stage, is where the student nurse usually learns by being instructed where they acquire the domain-specific features, actions, and facts. The rules that the beginners are given are usually “context-free” that means the applications of the rules ignores the situation nuances. The second stage is the advanced beginner stage where the person starts making sense and using the “situational elements.”

They begin employing the overall features of the situation they faced, and experience acquired previously which mainly makes it possible (English, I., 1993). The third stage is the competence stage when the individual organizes their actions by following hierarchical long-range plans. This stage proves an increased efficiency level although their planning is still analytic, deliberate, abstract, and conscious. The fourth stage is the proficiency stage where the situations are mainly perceived as whole rather than aspects that are unconnected (Ericsson, K.A., Smith, J., 2011). In this stage, certain features are ignored while others are considered as being salient. Here, the proficient nurses can understand and organize the problem situations intuitively. But the individuals still needs analytical thinking in choosing their actions.

The final stage in the influential theory is the expertise stage (Field, D.E., 2004). In this stage, the individuals not only have the understanding of the situation, but also the decision of what should be done next is usually fluid and intuitive. By being given the deep understanding of the situation, the experts’ nurses’ acts naturally without having to solve problems and explicitly making decisions from their community experience. The student nurse in this stage is eligible in registering to becoming professional nurses. Benner’s work has been criticized for many Jasper John’s being one of them (Freyhoff, H., Gruber, H., Ziegler, A., 2012).

According to Jasper John’s the proficiency stage in nursing occurs before the competence stage. According to her, she perceived that before a nurse become eligible in organizing their work as whole from their community experience, they must be able to know the characteristics to ignore and the one to focus fully on. As an expert, someone must know how they should plan for handling their work efficiently. Therefore, Jasper recommends that the proficiency stage should appear before the competency stage.