Professional nurses have many roles to play, the nurses has roles to play in carrying out clinical duty, supervisory, administrative, educational, communication and research activities. One primary role of the professional nurse is to care for patients and ensure that they receive the best care, so that they could have a good state of health and well being. In maintaining this role, the nurse has to educate, teach and train patients, their family members, staff and students to ensure that patient can care for themselves and that fellow nurses give safe competent care to the patients. In the clinical area, to ensure the patients understands his health-illness state and able to cope with his health – illness state, the nurses should be caring and competence. Each nurses working in the field are made to be competent, their competency are checked regularly by the head nurse or CRN/ educators. The current trends is to make all nurses completed their competency during 3 months orientation and repeat the competency checklist according to schedule either yearly or two yearly.
Nursing is a science and an art. The art of nursing allows nurses to put into practice what they have learnt in theory. It is in the clinical area that nurses, get the opportunity to have practical experiences so as to be competent in nursing. Clinical experiences make nurses involves in a process that requires knowledge, skills and attitude base on her previous exposure and learning experiences. Clinical experiences are the pre requisite for a nurse to become charge nurse, head nurse or any senior position. Senior nurses should be the resource person who helps other nurses to develop their competencies for safe and effective nursing care.
Nurses who work on specialize area starts as a basic nurse once. They need to master their specialize skills to enable them to work in highly specialized area