604 - Helping Student Nurses Form a Professional Identity

Professional Identity in Nursing can be defined as “a sense of oneself, in relationship with others, that is influenced by the characteristics, norms and values of the nursing discipline, resulting in an individual thinking, acting and feeling like a nurse.” This definition is a contemporary one, and carries some of the key language used in other disciplines, particularly medicine. Through knowledge development strategies, there are now evidence-based domains that further explain professional identity in nursing: values and ethics, knowledge, leadership and professional comportment. Learn how the knowledge-building work of nurses all over the world is helping operationalize these domains and provide language for nurses and nursing students to better think, act and feel like professional nurses. Results from conceptual model development and testing, studies of beginning nursing students, and findings from an extensive interprofessional literature review will help participants bring this emerging concept back to their classrooms and clinical areas after this interactive concurrent session.