Challenges and Strategies for Managing Role Transition from Nursing Student to Graduate Registered Nurse

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Challenges and Strategies for Managing Role Transition from Nursing Student to
Graduate Registered Nurse
NUR3504 Transitioning to the Role of Registered Nurse
1400 Words

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Challenges and Strategies for Managing Role Transition from Nursing Student to
Graduate Registered Nurse
Registered nurses (RNs) play an essential role in our healthcare system in diseases
prevention, health promotion, and managing the health and wellbeing of individuals across the
lifespan. Henceforth, nursing is one of the most demanding professionals in the healthcare
industry and increased numbers of newly graduated RNs have been employed over the past
years. During the transition into practice period, students often perceived this process as
challenging, overwhelming, sophisticated, difficult, mentally stressful, and physically strenuous
(Bado et al., 2020; Opoku et al., 2021). Additionally, work environment stressors and
professional-related factors such as unpredictable workload, burnout, workplace bullying,
trauma, skill deficit, role conflict, low resilience level, poor time management skills, and lack of
interpersonal skills also contributed to transition ‘shock’ (Bado et al., 2020; Opoku et al., 2021;
Cooper et al., 2020). As healthcare facilities and universities offered limited support including
educational resources and practical sessions compared to the real clinical settings (Mellor et al.,
2017). Which required the development of personal resilience and support of others to overcome
clinical challenges (Cooper et al., 2020; Lyu, et al., 2020). This essay will discuss various issues
that affect the transitioning stage for newly graduated RNs and identify coping strategies using
evidence-based journal articles. Moreover, inform future nursing peers to develop an
understanding of professional accountabilities and clinical working ethics to provide
comprehensive quality safe patient care and promote personal resilience during transition to
practice.

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Challenges
The transition from student nurse to the graduate registered nurse can be anxious with many
emotions ranging from happiness and fear or excitement (Mountain & al 2020). The particular
challenges which the student encountered during the transition phase are as follows:
Transition shock: It is one of the significant shocks that students experience when moving from
their comfort zone to completely different zone (Bhandari & et.al 2018). In this stage, many
students experience the feeling of drowning, alongside the exhaustion feeling for trying to
stabilise the emotions. Some of the graduates also found this stage as a roller-coaster with mixed
emotions. It is also found that new nurses fear of being exposed as unprofessional and
amateurish, which will impact the overall whole journey students also fears about low
performance and try to do better which puts lots of pressure to work in efficient manner only
(Keshk, Qalawa & Ibrahim, 2018). Ultimately in this stage new students deals with too many
emotions such as being ignored by the employers and not able to manage work. It is further said
that at the initial stage, student’s self-doubt themselves and this exhaustion leads to the burnout
stage, job dissatisfaction and also lead to turnover.
Conflicts and workplace bullying: This problem is also called lateral violence. Workplace
bullying is negative behaviour by the senior colleague to the new or junior nurse. This kind of
bullying can be done in several forms, such as verbally insults, eye-rolling and unwarranted
criticism that affects the mental stage of a person (Sandhu & Matlock, 2020). Thus most of the
areas it is seen that new nurses are constantly bullied by the senior nursing staff, which
demotivates the person in such many new students plans to leave the premises and to quit the
job. If the workplace lacks transparency and effective communication, it leads to many conflicts,
as for new nurse, it is somehow difficult to manage in such environment. Overall both conflict