Assessment: Professional Communication Essay
The purpose of this assessment is to assist you in developing academic skills in reading and writing for your nursing studies and to help you integrate knowledge on effective communication for nursing practice into your learning. By completing this assessment, students will learn about summarising, academic paragraphing and essay writing skills that are essential to nursing studies and the profession. It will allow you to demonstrate your capacity to think critically about issues vital to professional nursing communication, and to organise ideas logically, and write them down in a scholarly way. It is important for the nurse to develop lifelong learning skills in reading (with a purpose) to expand knowledge and to write proficiently as a health care professional, and to develop open-mindedness, reflection, critical thinking and self-awareness skills for effective nursing communication and patient centered care. This assessment item addresses learning outcomes 3 and 4. Details Students will submit the assessment as an academic essay (1200 words) based on learning from the set readings and reliable additional sources. You will be provided with four (4) designated extracts taken from set weekly chapter readings in the essential texts for this Unit. These extracts and additional sources must be referenced using correct APA style both in-text in the essay and the reference list. The set extracts from the essential texts can be found in Assessments on vUWS for this Unit. In addition to the four (4) designated extracts you will need to paraphrase, summarise and reference in your essay, you must also paraphrase, summarise and reference two (2) relevant, reliable and current academic sources in your essay, one (1) of the additional sources must be a nursing journal article, and one (1) must be from a reputable nursing Website source or report (e.g. the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) codes and guidelines). Students will write an appropriately structured Professional Communication Essay that includes the following:
• Explain why it is important for the nurse to use effective verbal and non-verbal communication in the delivery of patient centred care.
• Identify ways nurses use communication to provide culturally competent and effective education to promote patient health literacy and learning.
Discuss how the use of thoughtful practice in nursing can support effective communication in providing patient centred care.
In line with academic writing guidelines, the essay is to be written impersonally using the third person (e.g. the nurse).