Advancing practice: from staff nurse to nurse consultant. Part 1: specialist and advanced practice.

摘要

This series of articles is designed to help you advance your nursing practice; it begins by exploring the motivation to advance your practice and the differences between specialist and advanced practice. For some practitioners, advancing your practice will be about developing a specialist role. For others it might be about undergoing additional training to take on an advanced or extended role. For many it will be about developing and improving the role you currently have.Wherever you see your career heading, the principles of advancing practice that are covered in this series will be relevant to you. How ambitious are you? My experience of nurses is that they are people-centred, caring and not particularly ambitious. I know that is a broad generalisation, but I speak as someone who has been a nurse for a long time and has worked with many hundreds of nurses. How do you fit with that profile? Particularly that last trait of not being particularly ambitious? Often a lack of ambition arises out of a lack of inner confidence.