This portfolio represents my personal, educational, and professional nursing growth throughout the BSN program at Western Governors University. This program allowed me to advance my education as a nurse as well as learn new ways to use my skills. My portfolio contains: learned skills, projects, papers, and examples of how I was able to reach my professional goals while attending this program. Lastly, my continued professional and educational goals are shown in this portfolio.

A.1 Complete a Mission Statement

My goal professionally after completing my BSN is to become a NP who specializes in care for special needs children. A major goal of mine is to continue to educate myself on how to provide the best possible care for my patients and their families. This includes keeping up to date with any current studies and research that may apply to this field of nursing. Providing quality care with compassion, knowledge, and respect is my mission statement and something I wish to achieve daily. Understanding and striving to find positive ways to communicate, especially with non-verbal patients, has become something I feel very passionately about. Many people feel that the patients I work with are unaware of their surroundings or feelings and that they are incapable of expressing anything. In my experiences, this is very inaccurate. Every patient I have ever encountered has adapted and is very capable of expressing themselves in some way (including their wants and needs). By striving to achieve these goals I hope to have a positive impact on my patients and their family’s lives while providing them with the highest quality of care.

History on how I reached my mission statement: Being a nurse became a goal of mine as an incredibly young age. I enjoyed helping people and was always looking for ways to assist my friends and family in any way I could. As time went on and life happened, my dream career of becoming a nurse got pushed aside due to trials and life in general. But there was always the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I was not doing what I had always wanted to do. Finally, at the age of 28 I decided I was going to go to nursing school and obtain my goal. It was not easy being a single mom with a young child. I encountered numerous challenges and feelings of just wanting to quit at times. What kept me going were family, friends, and ultimately knowing that I loved helping and caring for other people. After graduating with my ASN, I knew I wanted to pursue my BSN. My goal of pursing my BSN was set aside at this time as started work and time went flying by.

My first nursing job I took was home health working with special needs children. I went into this job thinking it would be a steppingstone and I would move on to something quickly. I was told this was true for many nurses that had done this type of nursing before. Working in this field of nursing was daunting at first because I had not learned a lot about the cares and skills needed for these children. Working with vents, tracheostomies, and gastronomies was not something I had a lot of experience with nor had I learned a lot about in school. There were times of frustration because I wanted to be more knowledgeable and proficient about everything I was doing. This made me decide to educate myself through anything I could: books, pamphlets, manuals, seminars, training sessions, using parent/family knowledge, and asking other healthcare providers for help and/or answers. The more knowledge I gained, the more comfortable I became with my skills and abilities to care for my patients. Even with the challenges, it did not take me