Nursing Professionalism: 8 Ways To Uplift Your Nurse Career

Your professionalism, the way you behave and carry yourself, can decide whether you get promoted or get passed over.

Nursing is a profession, but professionalism is something each nurse develops over a career. Think of it as a sliding scale, from the new recruit on one end to the professional ideal on the other. Socialization into that culture starts the day a student enters nursing school and continues as the nurse increasingly adopts its norms and values, on the unit and in the community. Few nurses ever reach the ideal, and not everyone develops at the same pace.

Those norms and values are spelled out in nursing codes of ethics. To put them into practice, work through the statements, discuss them, and measure your own practice against them. The eight elements below cover patient care, your own development, and how you work with colleagues and the community. Strengthen them and you raise both your professionalism and your odds of advancement.

1. Put caring first

Nursing exists because people need care when they're vulnerable. Caring is the nurse's defining function, and every other professional behavior supports it. Meet most of the ethical code by genuinely caring for each patient: accept them as unique, respect their rights, and address their physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs. That includes respecting dignity regardless of nationality, race, creed, color, age, sex, politics, or social status.

2. Be responsible and accountable

Nurses are no longer subservient to physicians. You're an independent practitioner with the authority to make nursing care decisions for your patients, which means you analyze, question, use initiative, and decide. That authority cuts both ways. If you carry out an order or prescription you've been trained to recognize as wrong instead of questioning it, you're professionally liable when something goes wrong, and you can lose your license.

3. Advocate for your patient

Advocacy is a newer term, but the idea runs through Virginia Henderson's definition of nursing: the nurse assists the individual, sick or well, in performing activities they'd manage on their own if they had the strength, will, or knowledge. As an advocate, you act on the client's behalf to help them get the care and assistance they can't secure for themselves, whether that client is a patient, a family, or a community. Do it professionally and to accepted standards.

4. Keep good relationships with coworkers

Quality care depends on strong communication and cooperation across the healthcare team, and the nurse often coordinates it, since she spends the most time with the patient. Settle any disagreement, between the patient and the team or within the team, professionally and never in front of the patient.

5. Protect patient confidentiality

Every nurse learns this in training, and it's written into every code of nursing and medical ethics, often into law as well. Yet breaches happen daily, usually without anyone noticing, in casual conversation. Listen during a tea break and you'll often catch one. Sharing patient information with other team members caring for that patient is appropriate, and the codes make room for it. Idle gossip is not.

6. Build and raise professional standards

Only nurses set the standards for nursing care, and it's on you to keep measuring your practice against them. A real commitment to quality means working to raise those standards over time, not just meet them.

7. Stay competent

Good care depends on a nurse who takes responsibility for her own knowledge and keeps up with new developments. Keep an inquiring mind, learn constantly, and don't cap your learning at the CPD points you need for registration. With everything available online, there's no excuse for leaving a knowledge gap unfilled. And when you assign tasks to other nurses, you remain ultimately responsible for that care, so teach them to do it correctly and to standard.

8. Take part in professional affairs

Stay engaged with the profession and the issues facing nursing and healthcare. Professional groups, including associations and specialty societies, drive change far more effectively than individuals can, through sheer numbers. Getting active in them and sharing your expertise adds real weight to your development and recognition.