determine whether any action is within or without their scope.

Nursing is well defined as the practice of protecting, optimizing and promoting health abilities of individuals, preventing illnesses and injuries, eliminating suffering from individuals through the activities of diagnosing or treating the human response and providing high-quality care to individuals and families. Nurses, therefore, commit to helping individuals recover from health illnesses and other uncomfortable conditions and situation through the nursing skills and experience that they have. Like in any other practices, it is extremely important for practitioners in this profession to understand the scope of their profession, for them to easily determine whether any action is within or without their scope. This paper provides a clear description of the factors that nurses should utilize to determine whether any action is within their scope of practice or not. It also explains why these factors would provide a clear understanding and response to this requirement for the individuals and the most prioritized factor.

The first factor that nurses should consider to attain an understanding of whether an action is within their scope is whether they learned the required skills in carrying out the action within their basic nursing program course. The practice of nursing broad and nurses are provided with numerous knowledge to handle very many aspects. Some of their knowledge is means to enhance their understanding while other information is provided to them in order to equip them with the required skills that they will need to apply in the field. For most of the actions that they will be required to involve in, however, they are taught how to carry them out effectively in their basic nursing program and thus any practice whose knowledge is provided within their basic nursing program is within their scope.

The second main factor that an individual should consider is whether the activity was learned in any of the comprehensive programs of training offered in the practice of nursing, through which clinical experience is obtained. Many comprehensive programs exist in the nursing practice, through which nurses are equipped with further knowledge and understanding of certain activities. This knowledge is taught to them in order to increase their abilities in addressing sickness issues that individuals might have and thus for that reason, when the nurses have the knowledge from such program, any action that requires the skills is within their scope. The other main factor that the nurses should consider to determine whether an action is within their scope is whether the action is an extremely common practice in the nursing
field, such that it can recently be assumed to be within the nursing scope. An example is an activity like wound dressing, which nurses involve infrequently. When an action is thus common in the nursing practice such that almost all nurses are well skilled in carrying it out, the action should simply be regarded as within the scope of nursing (Olin, 2012).