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Two nursing professionals explain the importance of staying curious and challenging the status quo to provide the best patient care.

In our experiences as clinicians and educators, neither of us has ever met a successful nurse who’s satisfied with the status quo. Nurses share a spirit of inquiry—a drive to know why and a refusal to accept care decisions due to tradition or convention. The skill of confronting "the way it is always done" is difficult, particularly early in your career. However, if the status quo doesn’t make sense, nurses must be comfortable challenging it because someone’s life may depend on it. Here are three skills you should prioritize in your first year as a new nurse—all centered on asking “Why?”—to build the foundation needed for a successful career.

Developing Situational Awareness to Prevent Errors

Situational awareness is a foundational component of nursing practice that serves as the basis for sound clinical judgment. You must be able to interpret the clinical cues around you and piece them together to understand what is going on with your patient so you can provide individualized patient-centered care. On top of that, you always need to know the reasoning behind your interventions. The heart of being a nurse is advocating for the most effective solutions for your patient—thinking like a nurse, rather than just doing nurse-related tasks. To do this, just ask, “Why?” “Why is my patient getting intervention ‘X’ instead of intervention ‘Y?’” “Why might my patient develop a complication?” “Why do some nurses on my unit perform this procedure differently than I learned it?”

It is challenging to speak out as a new nurse. You might also fear that asking questions makes you look like you don’t know what you’re doing. But as experienced nurses working with novices, we find it more concerning when new nurses aren’t asking questions. From a safety perspective, it is imperative that you ask questions in order to develop your own clinical judgment.

Research shows that novices make a large percentage of the errors caused by nurses, and the majority of those errors are related to medication administration. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) recently highlighted a need to improve math education in nursing. Because learning to safely administer medications goes beyond a textbook, it is worth investing in hands-on resources that develop clinical judgment and skills to prepare you for real-world situations. Learning tools, like UWorld’s Clinical Med Math, allow nurses and nursing students to practice dosage calculations without the risk of harming a patient if they make a mistake. 

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