NUR 4013 Module 2 Professional Identity Paper Example

From Estimating to Measuring: What the Baccalaureate Adds to Eleven Years in Labor and Delivery

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR4013: Transition to Professional Nursing: Issues and Concepts

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

January 19, 2026

Introduction

For eleven years I have worked in labor and delivery at a community hospital that delivers about 1,900 babies a year. I earned an associate degree, passed the licensing examination and learned the specialty the way most nurses do, by working beside experienced colleagues until their judgment became mine. The hospital, the colleagues and the patients described in this paper are composites written for this assignment. I came into this RN to BSN program with a confident sense of who I am as a nurse, and part of the purpose of this paper is to test that confidence against what the profession says baccalaureate education is supposed to add.

My argument is that the baccalaureate does not add a new set of bedside skills to an experienced nurse; it adds a different question, which is whether the way a unit does something can be defended with evidence and measured for its effect on patients. That question changes professional identity because it moves a nurse's sense of responsibility from the patient in front of her to the pattern of care that every patient on the unit receives. The paper first defines professional identity, then reviews the research linking nurse education to patient outcomes, then describes one practice change from my own unit, and finally connects that change to the competencies expected of baccalaureate graduates in the national Essentials (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2021).

What Professional Identity Means

Professional identity is more than job title or scope of practice. Johnson et al. (2012) describe it as the sense of oneself as a member of a profession, built from the values, knowledge and ways of reasoning that the profession shares and continually reshaped by education and experience. Their review is useful here because it treats identity as something that develops over a career rather than something fixed at licensure. A nurse can be highly competent and still hold an identity built mainly around tasks, while another nurse with the same tasks understands herself as accountable for the evidence behind them.

Benner (1982) described how nurses move from novice to expert through experience, and her account fits my own history closely. Expert nurses in her description perceive situations as wholes and act on patterns they recognize without having to reason through every rule. That is an accurate picture of what eleven years in one specialty feels like. It also points to a limitation Benner herself noted: pattern recognition built on experience can carry forward whatever the unit has always done, including practices that were never tested. Expertise explains how I became fast and reliable; it does not explain how I would know if something I do reliably is wrong.

What the Research Says the Degree Adds

The strongest evidence that baccalaureate education matters comes from studies of patient outcomes. Aiken et al. (2003) examined surgical patients discharged from 168 Pennsylvania hospitals and reported that every 10-point rise in the share of nurses with a bachelor's degree went with 5 percent lower odds that a patient would die within a month of admission, and 5 percent lower odds of failure to rescue. Eleven years later, the same research group found the pattern again across 300 European hospitals in nine countries, where every additional 10 percent of bachelor's-prepared nurses on staff was linked to 7 percent lower odds of a patient dying in the hospital after a common operation (Aiken et al., 2014).

These findings need to be read carefully. Both studies are observational, so they show association rather than proof that the degree itself caused the difference. A hospital with a larger share of BSN-prepared nurses is probably unlike its peers in other respects too, and the authors adjusted for many of those differences without being able to remove all of them. Even so, the consistency of the association across two health systems and two decades is difficult to explain away. This body of evidence sat behind the national goal that 80 percent of the nursing workforce hold a baccalaureate (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2011), and the follow-up report a decade later tied nursing education to the profession's capacity to address health equity (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021).

What interests me in this research is less the size of the effect than the mechanism the authors propose. They suggest that baccalaureate preparation strengthens surveillance, the early recognition of a patient who is deteriorating, and the use of evidence to guide care. Those are not new tasks; they are a different way of paying attention to the tasks a nurse already performs. That interpretation matches my experience of this program so far more closely than any claim about new skills would.

One Change in Practice: Measuring Blood Loss

The clearest example of this different attention on my own unit concerns postpartum hemorrhage. For most of my career, blood loss after a vaginal birth was estimated by looking at the pads, the drapes and the under-buttocks drape and naming a number. Experienced nurses were considered good at it, and I was proud of being one of them. When I read the committee opinion from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG, 2019), I learned that visual estimation tends to underestimate large losses, precisely the losses that matter most, and that quantitative methods such as weighing soaked materials and using calibrated drapes give a more accurate measure.

Knowing this changed how I understood my own skill. A nurse who estimates well compared with her colleagues can still be consistently wrong in the direction that delays treatment. The practice question was no longer whether I was good at estimating but whether the unit should be estimating at all. Our unit had calibrated drapes on the shelf and a scale in every room, yet documentation still read estimated blood loss on most charts. Working with our clinical educator, I helped draft a two-page procedure for cumulative quantitative blood loss, including the dry weights of the materials we stock, and we audited the first 60 vaginal births after it began.

In that audit, quantitative blood loss was documented for 41 of 60 births, or 68 percent, in the first month, compared with almost none before the change. The audit did not measure maternal outcomes, and a single month on one unit could not show an effect on hemorrhage treatment. What it did show is that the unit could measure something it had always guessed, and that nurses began talking about blood loss as a number with a method behind it rather than as a judgment about who had the better eye.

Connecting the Change to the Essentials

The Essentials (AACN, 2021) organize baccalaureate competencies into ten domains, and the blood loss change touches several of them. Domain 4, Scholarship for the Nursing Discipline, expects graduates to find, appraise and apply evidence, which is what reading the committee opinion and comparing it with our practice required. Domain 5, Quality and Safety, expects graduates to use data to improve care, which is what the audit began to do. Domain 7, Systems-Based Practice, expects graduates to see how the design of a system shapes individual performance, and the calibrated drapes that sat unused on the shelf were a small lesson in that.

Domain 9, Professionalism, is where this paper's argument about identity belongs. The Essentials describe professional identity formation as an ongoing process, not a milestone reached at graduation, and they connect it to accountability for the quality of care beyond one's own patients. Before this program, I would have described my professional identity mainly in terms of reliability at the bedside. I would now add a second part: responsibility for asking whether what we do reliably is also what the evidence supports.

Conclusion

Eleven years at the bedside gave me expertise that this program does not replace and does not need to. What the baccalaureate adds, based on the research and on my own first months of study, is a habit of questioning whether unit practices are defensible and a willingness to measure them. The outcome studies suggest that this habit, repeated across many nurses, is associated with safer care for patients. My commitment for the rest of this program is to choose one more practice on my unit that is done by habit, find the best available evidence on it, and bring what I find to our practice council by the end of the next term.

References

Aiken, L. H., Clarke, S. P., Cheung, R. B., Sloane, D. M., & Silber, J. H. (2003). Educational levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. JAMA, 290(12), 1617-1623. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.290.12.1617

Aiken, L. H., Sloane, D. M., Bruyneel, L., Van den Heede, K., Griffiths, P., Busse, R., Diomidous, M., Kinnunen, J., Kozka, M., Lesaffre, E., McHugh, M. D., Moreno-Casbas, M. T., Rafferty, A. M., Schwendimann, R., Scott, P. A., Tishelman, C., van Achterberg, T., & Sermeus, W. (2014). Nurse staffing and education and hospital mortality in nine European countries: A retrospective observational study. The Lancet, 383(9931), 1824-1830. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62631-8

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Publications/Essentials-2021.pdf

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (2019). Quantitative blood loss in obstetric hemorrhage (ACOG Committee Opinion No. 794). Obstetrics & Gynecology, 134(6), e150-e156. https://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0000000000003564

Benner, P. (1982). From novice to expert. American Journal of Nursing, 82(3), 402-407. https://doi.org/10.1097/00000446-198282030-00004

Institute of Medicine. (2011). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12956

Johnson, M., Cowin, L. S., Wilson, I., & Young, H. (2012). Professional identity and nursing: Contemporary theoretical developments and future research challenges. International Nursing Review, 59(4), 562-569. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-7657.2012.01013.x

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). The future of nursing 2020-2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25982