Practices in accordance with legislation affecting nursing practice & Practices within the limits of own competence and take measures: Nursing Reflective Practice Assignment, DCU, Ireland

• Practices in accordance with legislation affecting nursing practice.
• Practices within the limits of own competence and take measures to develop own competence.
• Establishes and maintains caring therapeutic interpersonal relationships with individual children, their parents, and families.

Communication skills, both with the child and parents are at the core of children’s nursing. Many complex and sophisticated communication strategies are needed by the Children’s Nurse, as s/he tries to empower the family to understand and cope with anticipated health issues for their children. In addition to this, The children’s Nurse supports the child’s development and autonomy. Research has shown that nurses often positioned children as either passive bystanders or active participants in the communication process in the hospital environment. This signifies the extent of children’s inclusion or exclusion in the communication process and the degree to which children’s communication needs were met or not within the clinical environment.

Over the year of your professional children’s nursing training, you will have many opportunities to develop your communication and interpersonal skills, with children and with families. Being interpersonally skilled includes the development of your own self-awareness, which is the ability to recognize the impact that your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can have on other people, and, conversely, the ways in which other people influence your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

Developing self-awareness involves you being able to recognize your own unique, personal issues and responses concerning the two-way street of influencing and being influenced by others. Self-awareness of this kind is an important part of acquiring the skills to communicate effectively and professionally with children, parents, and colleagues.