Reflection

My post-secondary education began back in 2009 by pursuing a degree in Fine Arts at York University. I didn’t have a clear career goal in mind for graduation but I knew I didn’t want to become a teacher. Serendipitously, my summer job was at a private medical clinic group in the Medical Device Reprocessing Department and I was grandfathered in as a Medical Device Reprocessing Technician. When I graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in 2013, I eagerly set off on a journey to begin living and working in Japan. In Japan, I worked as an English teacher and after a year returned home and was hired by the same clinic as a MDR Technician. I gained more training as a Certified Endoscopy Reprocessing Trainer. I transferred to radiology and set up interventional radiology and IPAC processes. I transferred to interventional pain management and assisted the medical director in writing and implementing policy and procedure. I even worked as a COVID-19 screener during the pandemic. Over the years I wore many hats and gained valuable experience, but I realized that none of them were long-term options if I wanted to have a fulfilling career.

Working with the nurses at the pain clinic and interacting with the patients had made me realize that nurses fulfill various roles in health care. Nursing was not confined to what I had imagined, such as mainly roles in hospitals, urgent cares or the like. The therapeutic nurse-client relationship was very real, as we would jokingly say, “The patients come for the doctor, but they stay for the nurse.” After the COVID-19 Pandemic, I began taking night school classes to get the prerequisites I needed to apply to nursing school. After two years of night school, I received my Offer of Admission from Trent University and my nursing journey started to become real.

I started nursing school in September of 2024. I was incredibly intimidated but determined in my resolve to return to school full-time after more than 10 years. Keeping up with the high academic workload was a significant adjustment. While I thoroughly plan and prioritize my academic tasks to minimize stress, I still find establishing balance between my academic and private life a challenge. A study of factors associated with undergraduate nursing students’ academic and clinic performance found that having a supportive educational environment and quality educators that were knowledgeable and approachable enhanced students’ performance and readiness for practice (Fooladi, 2022). I certainly feel this is the case with my nurse educators at Trent, as there are frequent discussions about establishing self-care and resilience strategies to stress. My experience is that every educator has been warm, personable and available to for guidance. When I consider how I appreciate these traits now as I am learning, I hope to embody these same qualities if I ever am responsible for student nurses and certainly when I am caring for and educating patients, as it will certainly be a source of comfort to others when times are stressful.

When my nursing studies began, discussions about our future practices always centred around nursing being a reflective, evidence-based practice formed around ethics and values. A study of nurses in leadership roles found that addressing evidence-based practice and implementation in education and undergraduate studies would help address imbalances between performance monitoring and critique-based reflective practice in future health care leaders (Harvey, 2019). Our lecturers have always emphasized that making evidence-based decisions is part of the expected standard of care for patients. I now understand how it can extend further; by efficiently utilizing evidence-based practice, the need for performance monitoring and reflective feedback decreases, helping to regulate these other aspects of nursing practice. This will be a practice I mindfully implement to maximize the time I have to care for patients, make the best evidence-informed decisions and lead by example. A study of academic integrity and moral sensitivity of undergraduate nursing students found that nursing ethics and values were best integrated into multiple courses and content for improved knowledge retention (Alnajjar, 2021). My perspective on what these values mean to me and how I can best apply them to care for patients, their families and to work together as part of a care team are ever-evolving. I do believe as the personal meaning of these values change, it is important to revisit and re-evaluate not only the personal meaning but the general intent set forth in the CNA Code of Ethics and the CNO Code of Conduct to engage in reflective practice and improve my future nursing practice.

I am excited for the first semester of nursing school to be coming to an end and for clinical placement in second semester to be around the corner. I am excited to apply the knowledge I have learned thus far and translate into hands-on learning experiences in the new year.