Health professionals have obligations in regards of protection, promotion and optimization of health abilities to prevent from illness. It helps to guide in focusing the normal principals of care and justice and also motivates certain civic action. Social responsibility is “strongly linked to the values of professions in general and nursing in particular” and that “the underlying constructs of social responsibility, communication and teamwork are woven into the fabric of nursing’s history and its code of ethics”(Kelley,2008). Communication, social responsibility and teamwork, are an integral part of the nursing profession.
These three attributes of the profession comes through citizenship. This essay will discuss about citizenship with social responsibility, communication, and team work. Nurses values citizen with social skill, sharing idea from each other and also cooperation and respect among the people. Communication : Communication is very important in workplace. For nurses, communication is needed for quality health care. Effective communication has many aspects like it should be respectful, assertive, empathetic, clear, attentive, honest and non-judgmental. It is a skill that can be learned and continually improved.
Improvement requires keen observation, willingness to be reflective, and the commitment to listen . Learning communication is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of speech, visuals, signals and written behaviours. In nursing, communication is a sharing of health-related information between a patient and a nurse, with both participants as sources and receivers (Sheldon 2004, p. 4). For example, communication are changing as people respond to the circumstances of their life and their environment. However, perception is one of the most important aspects of communication.
Understanding depends on experience, culture and knowledge. (Dwyer,2012) . For example ,one person may perceive the season winter as cool, peaceful and comforting while another person’s opinion may winter is bad for heath . The particular or specific meaning is influenced by past experience. However, the exchange of information, feelings, and concerns is a vitally important condition in relationships in health care. This is because many diagnoses and clinical situations produce anxiety in patients, requiring time for them to discuss their concerns (Stiles & Shuster, 1992, Maguire, Faulkner, Booth, Elliot, & Hillier, 1995).
Frequently, communication in health care becomes hurried because of time constraints, or is medically oriented and unidirectional, for example, provider to patient (Ford, Fallowfield, & Lewis, 1996). Good communication in the workplace brings positive behaviour from an employee. It motivates and encourages an employee to do the work. Otherwise it is very difficult for an employee to do the work in proper manner. Effective communication strategies are essential when building a relationship with the patient so that misunderstandings and confusion do not occur (Leonard & Frankel, 2011).
The concept of ‘health citizenship’ introduced here refers to health knowledge that integrates the lay knowledge of patients and that this integration is translated into health actions for patients. Social Responsibility Social responsibility is a value and is observable by others. In this paper, concepts related to citizenship, social responsibility, and professionalism is linked with Charles Darwin University in nursing education. Social responsibility is a critical component of the roles and responsibilities which is integral part of the nursing profession.
As nurse educators, it is our responsibility to ensure that citizenship is an essential aspect of basic nursing education. Social responsibility teaches us to value our status as a citizen with social skill, sharing idea with class room, help and respect each other. It include moral principles of care and justice that motivates certain action. Nurses have an obligation to protection, promote and optimize the healthy by their patient and help to prevent from illness. Nursing is the social responsibility in the community.
Mainly social responsibility is rooted in relationships with others and it helps to guide in promoting these types of behaviours.. It also part of caring and justice as distinct but compatible principles. Social responsibility is a value of personal identities. Social responsibility includes communication, compassion and disciplinary message. Nursing profession also has the capacity in helping to build up the society as well as its wellbeing. Social responsibility is define as reflecting to about that extend beyond personal wants, needs or gains(Gally,2006).
Nursing has a commitment to fulfilling a social contract for care with society (Crigger, 2008; International Council of Nurses [ICN], 2006a;Kelley, Connor, Kun, & Salmon, 2008). Nursing’s social responsibility is also expressed within issues that affect the profession. To sum up, social responsibility motivates a certain kind of citizenship that roots in care and justice and stems from obligation to contribute to society. As a profession, nursing also has the capacity to focus on the well-being of a society in advocating for social change. Pitzer College 2007) defines, social responsibility as a core value that includes “awareness, knowledge, and behaviour based upon a commitment to the values of equity, access, and justice; a dedication to civic involvement and environmental sustainability; and a respect for diversity, pluralism, and freedom of expression. ” Citizenship and social responsibility are increasingly important concepts relative to the interconnectedness of people on local, national, and global levels( Kelley MA,2008).
It is assumed that once one acknowledges oneself as a nurse, nurses assume the role of sharing with “society the responsibility for initiating and supporting action to meet the health and social needs of the public, in particular those of vulnerable populations. Teamwork Nurses work in diverse work contexts. Australia is a multicultural country. So nurses have to work with people from different cultures. We learn team work with citizenship at nursing course in Charles Darwin University. Behaviour that may contribute to the effectiveness of teams is team member’s citizenship behaviour.
Organ(1988)conceptualized organizational citizenship behaviour and defined it as “individual behaviour that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by formal reward system and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization”(p. 4). Its include behaviours such as helping co-workers burden with workload, helping new workers, In fact, group cooperativeness and cohesion should be facilitated through the visibility of a supervisor and his or her engagement in helping behaviours.
Team performance also can be fostered by health care managers clarifying members’ roles, but teams cannot operate in isolation. Teamwork is defined as two or more interdependent individuals with explicit role assignments who perform specific tasks, make decisions, and coordinate to achieve a common goal or outcome (Kalisch, Weaver, & Salas, 2009). In the end, there are several critical and essential behaviours, effective leadership, a team orientation, closed-looped communication, adaptability, trust, shared mental models, mutual performance monitoring, and back up of one another (Salas, Sims, & Burke, 2005).
Higher levels of teamwork in nursing result in a higher quality of care. Nurses, similarly to other employees, are likely to experience numerous workplace relationships including with their supervisors and colleagues in the same team (Masterson et al, 2000) and notably, workplace relationships are especially vital for women’s intentions to continue working (Shacklock, Brunetto and Nelson 2009). Directly volunteerism, assistance between co-workers ,unusual attendance or punctuality and active participation in organizational affair. Farh,Podsakoff & organ,1990) Conclusion: Citizenship focus an important role in nursing profession. Lastly, for any profession it is important that there exists a spirit of teamwork. It is necessary to build good rapport with everyone we work with. It is very important in nursing profession. Nurses function as a part of some unit ,effective communication is another primary thing here. These are the basic which nurses brings out when they are working.
They do their jobs in most effective manner if they are happy with their profession. Thus motivation is required . Citizenship is the one which certainly motivates them to work for better. If they feel that they are an integral part of the society, they brings out all the spirits of team work and communication. Hence citizenship means a lot in this profession. Organizational citizenship behaviour benefit directly and indirectly.