Assignment: AACN Essentials Self-Assessment

Assignment: AACN Essentials Self-Assessment
Assignment: AACN Essentials Self-Assessment
Describe the relationship between the AACN Essentials and your new-found knowledge about Patient Centered Care. Are there opportunities for you to improve?
Essential VIII: Professionalism and Professional Values discusses professional standards of moral, ethical, and legal conduct. Review the Professional Integrity Module-Academics and Practice at the beginning of the course (the first module). Then reflect on your own beliefs and values as they relate to professional nursing practice.
Discuss implications of professional nursing integrity and academic integrity.
Religious leaders, such as Martin Luther, who led the Reformation in 1517, were well aware of the lack of adequate nursing care as a result of these sweeping changes. Luther advocated that each town establish something akin to a “community chest” to raise funds for hospitals and nurse visitors for the poor (Dietz & Lehozky, 1963). Thus, the closures of the monasteries eventually resulted in the creation of public hospitals where laywomen performed nursing care. It was difficult to find laywomen who were willing to work in these hospitals to care for the sick, so judges began giving prostitutes, publically intoxicated women, and poverty-stricken women
the option of going to jail, going to the poorhouse, or working in the public hospital. Unlike the sick wards in monasteries, which were generally considered to be clean and well managed, the public hospitals were filthy, disorganized buildings where people went to die while being cared for by laywomen who were not trained, motivated, or qualified to care for the sick (Sitzman & Judd, 2014a).
In England, where there had been at least 450 charitable foundations before the Reformation, only a few survived the reign of Henry VIII, who closed most of the monastic hospitals (Donahue, 1985). Eventually, Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, who reigned from 1547 to 1553, endowed some hospitals, namely, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and St. Thomas’ Hospital, which would eventually house the Nightingale School of Nursing later in the 1800s (Bullough & Bullough, 1978).
The Dark Period of Nursing The last half of the period between 1500 and 1860 is widely regarded as the “dark period of nursing” because nursing conditions were at their worst (Donahue, 1985). Education for girls, which had been provided by the nuns in religious schools, was lost. Because of the elimination of hospitals and schools, there was no one to pass on knowledge about caring for the sick. As a result, the hospitals were managed and staffed by municipal authorities; women entering nursing service often came from illiterate classes, and even then, there were too few to serve (Dietz & Lehozky, 1963). The lay attendants who filled the nursing role were illiterate, rough, inconsiderate, and often immoral and alcoholic. Intelligent women and men could not be persuaded to accept such a degraded and low-status position in the offensive municipal hospitals of London. Nursing slipped back into a role of servitude as menial, low-status work. According to Donahue (1985), when a woman could no longer make it as a gambler, prostitute, or thief, she might become a nurse. Eventually, women serving jail sentences for such crimes as prostitution and stealing were ordered to care for the sick in the hospitals instead of serving their sentences in the city jail (Dietz & Lehozky, 1963). The nurses of this era took bribes from clients, became inappropriately involved with them, and survived the best way they could, often at the expense of their assigned clients.