Personal Development

Personal Development As A Student Nurse During The Pre-Registration Programme

Personal Development As A Student Nurse During The Pre-Registration Programme

This paper focuses on my personal development as a student nurse during the pre-registration programme. According to the British Medical Association, the personal development plan (PDP), is a tool that can identify areas for further development and encourage life long learning. It acts as a process of planning, monitoring, assessment, and support to help staff develop their capabilities and potential to fulfil their job role and purpose. It is an approach to increase the effectiveness of the organisation's performance through ongoing, constructive dialogue to ensure that everyone knows what is expected of them; gets feedback on performance; is able to identify and satisfy their development needs.

Due to the emerging importance of pre-registration nursing programme, the issue of transformational leadership in the nursing field has become a very important issue. This is partly due to the fact that existing literature covering leadership has found it difficult in characterizing effective clinical leaders. Using five attributes identified by Stuart (2007: 15-20) and other relevant published material, one would explain the issue of transformational leadership. The attributes are Creativity, highlighting, influencing, respecting, and supporting.

I was able to develop my creative skills. As Spouse (2003: 105-115), puts it, the essence of nursing, can be said to be 'an individually and socially defined creative process, to meet a recognised need'. Creativity results from engaging actively with the surroundings to seek new possibilities. Using an experience from an adult nurse, it was explained that the organisation (nursing) was not forward looking, but strictly structured. However, from an experience from a nurse who had just come back from a nursing course, the nurse applied for the course and enrolled, and that over the years they both used their creative experience to develop nursing to what it is now.

My second development was influencing. Influencing others through provision of meaningful information is the key to this attribute. According to McCormack (2004: 88-90), effective clinical leaders were able to help others to see and understand situations from various perspectives. For example, how I had agreed to take on the care of a person, within my team, in which there was already a burgeoning caseload. I used accurate case notes to keep a log of the happenings, whereby she shared it with the line managers and team. This helped in improving the team's performance as to how to deal and tackle with situations.

The third development was in relation to respecting others. This involves having a regard for the signals that emanate from individuals and the wider organisational area. Respecting these signals enables people to position themselves appropriately to respond to both individual and organisational needs Hewison (2003: 35-59), Downie (2008: 41-85), and Dougherty (2008: 16-20). Davies, (2000: 98-115) uses the term proxemics to explain this phenomenon. In this case effective clinical leaders have well-developed perceptual ability, and therefore, respect signals from individuals with whom they work ...