Academic Skills in Nursing and Midwifery

Nursing and midwifery are standalone professions in as much as they can be combined. Nurses require formal education and their expertise is required in a wider domain of healthcare services. For instance, nurses improve the quality of patient life in adult nursing. Their function extends beyond clinical knowledge in mental health and children nursing when they support community-based approaches to healthcare services and address child protection issues respectively.

Midwives area of practice is much narrower and they do not typically require formal education. They learn by hands-on experience. Their expertise covers pregnancy, delivery, gynecology and health education in related areas. Despite this high specialty, midwives are critical because child-birth is a defining aspect of women’s healthcare and lives in general.

It is also possible to combine both expertise in the title of nurse-midwife. In the USA, certification for expertise in nursing and midwifery is issued by the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM). Nurse-midwives get deployed in hospitals, clinics and in support of community healthcare. The approach in practice in this field is individualized and non-intervention medical care. </span >

Just as with any professional field, nursing and midwifery selects for individuals with particular attributes. In particular, a nurse-midwife should be someone inclined to help people, has empathy, is detail oriented and can remain composed in stressful situations. One needs to demonstrate academic competency as well and this is achieved by excelling in the following five areas:

1. Time Management
2. Listening
3. Reading
4. Research
5. Writing
6. Examinations

Time management skills is arguably the key component of academic success in nursing and midwifery. It allows an individual to meet all of his or her obligations and aspirations. The basis of managing one’s time properly is setting goals that make it simpler to determine what to prioritize. This makes it possible to meet a variety of deadlines despite varying levels of complexities of tasks to be done.

Schedules are the tools used to ensure adherence to proper time management. Nurses and midwives use both weekly and daily planners to allocate themselves enough time to attend to patients. This is necessary because their time is usually constrained by a heavy demand for their services or presence. In addition to actual medical care, they have to spend up to 35% of their time carrying out documentation as part of their administrative duties.

Listening is a necessary academic skill in nursing and midwifery because a student will spend a fair share of his time attending lectures. Information on course plans and tips on how to excel in the course will often be shared in lecture halls. This means that in addition to developing the discipline to attend lectures, one is required to fully concentrate on the lecturer’s words when in attendance.

How can you know that you are actively listening to a lecture? The only way is by demonstrating proactiveness to the matter being discussed. This can be done by taking notes to highlight the most important bits of information. The other way is by being proactive and turning the communication into a discussion at every chance you get - like asking questions.

A student of nursing and midwifery should set his goals for reading in order to make the most out of the activity. A goal of reading could be to go through advanced content, comprehend a concept, understand details or instruction and to come across new ideas. The information derived from these goals is then instilled by use of the 3Rs approach of Read, Recite and Review.

Use of schedules and reading plenty of material will get even more out of the reading experience. It is also a good habit to be courageous enough to expose oneself to even more challenging topics and styles of writing in nursing and midwifery. This is a way to become a well-rounded student.

Research is a defining feature of academia. All students in nursing and midwifery should be able to collect data, interpret and evaluate its meaning. This should be topped by being able to present the information to the intended audience. The presentation may be oral, requiring use of visual tools like presentation software. Presentation may also be in written form, as is typically the case, to be reviewed by other academics.

It is impossible to conduct good research without good sources of data. Data has to be derived from authoritative sources for it to pass standards required in academia. Therefore, research encourages analytical thinking to make decisions on what to trust. Nevertheless, sources of data for nursing and midwifery remain broad with the web, journals and textbooks being just a few mines of information.

There are different types of academic nursing writing that would each need their own articles to comprehensively go over. But they all test nursing and midwifery students on the same writing skills. Students should be able to evaluate literature through critical writing. He or she should also be able to share objective information by descriptive writing and assess relationships between variables through analytical writing. Last but not least, a student should be able to make a case for his or her own views and ideas through persuasive writing.

A research paper will require these competencies to be demonstrated in different sections of the writing. The sections of a research paper are:

Examinations make students anxious and many have even suggested that exams should be done away with. But they remain a standard way of objectively assessing the competencies of students in a field of study. Students who wish to excel in examinations need to understand that preparation is the key. And this takes many forms - from healthy living to developing a study.