Complexity of Nursing Practices - Essay Example

Nursing 101 Introduction: I am a beginner nursing I am at the juncture of enormous and outstanding changes in technological advancements in Medicine and Healthcare. New technologies, new treatments, and new pressures are mounting on the healthcare professionals on a daily basis. Added to that, rapid socioeconomic changes and related changes in response to social, political, and economic factors are challenging and changing everything—including nursing. Within this complexity, perhaps to ease the problems related to healthcare delivery, decentralization is the best way. Therefore, clinical care delivery and clinical learning experiences of a student nurse like me would ideally also drift from the conventional system. I am too novice to comment on this, and I am sure once my studies go in a full throttle, things will appear as they are. As is evident, in a healthcare setting dominated by specialists and super specialists, there is possibility of some kind of fragmentation of the care, and in my opinion, to avoid such, a holistic concept of people, health, wellness, and healing needs to be used. I know, a holistic perspective focuses on all dimensions of an individual, including physiological, psychological, social, cultural, cognitive, and spiritual. It has a philosophy inherent in this, and this philosophy, I believe, creates the fundamental paradigm of nursing as a profession. Although I am new in this field, I am given to understand that nursing is an art and science of caring and healing that promotes health. The spiritual aspect of nursing is very much relevant to even modern healthcare in the sense that at least spirit may indicate a will to live. This is the life force within a person and spirituality indicates the presence of this phenomenon. However, this is intangible and cannot be located. Without going in to the debate whether it is related to religious aspects of human life, scientific evidence suggests that loss of this life force is detrimental to survival. This concept encompasses a concern or caring that extends from ourselves to others, meaning as the nurse has care and concern for her won existence and survival, they should face the other with an equal concern for their existence and survival (Bunkers, SS., 2008). Disease is a process that expresses in a human being as a result of reaction to the environment, and according to my philosophy, nursing is a process by which the art of caring is manifested. This art of caring, of course, is guided by the philosophical approaches to define person, health, environment, and nursing. The major concepts that provide structure to the domain of nursing are person, environment, health, and nursing. These metaparadigm elements name the overall areas of concern for the nursing discipline. Although each nurse’s practice is obviously different, they all consider their work as part of the profession of nursing because all share the same major concerns. Therefore, regardless of the setting or the type of client involved, I expect each nurse is concerned with person, environment, health, and nursing (Carr, T., 2008). Person: The person is a combination of biological, psychological, social, and spiritual features, is in constant interaction with the environment to accomplish goals and maintain balance. Therefore, nursing would aim at health promotion, care, and cure of the diseased and prevention of disease in those who are well and continuously interacting with their environments. My philosophy in this regard is a little bit different where the person is not just the sum total of the functional organ systems, together it is in dynamic interaction with the environment with immense adaptability to changes where the person changes and can make changes in the environment to convert it into a suitable and compatible one. The person beyond being created good in God’s image is seen as an integrated and relational. There is no division between body and soul, and humans are embodied spirits (Wallace, M. et al., 2008). Thus a person is always in the look out for achieving the quality of life that he desires, and therefore, he would prefer to adjust his health to the quality that he has assigned for himself, and he thus is naturally empowered to take healthcare decisions for himself. Explaining further, any human is not just the singular existence, his social sphere would need interpersonal exchange, the nurses need to continue to foster an interpersonal milieu that focuses on the person while manipulating and mediating the environment to get the best possible condition for his survival and flourishing (Milton, CL., 2008). Health: Health from the above philosophy can be defined as a state and process of being becoming, and remaining an integrated entity, and lack of such integration could be defined as lack of health. In that sense health is not just a state of personal absence of disease, it is an additive process that could result into environmental, physical, and psychological factors. Thus this defines health as a part of the whole, and the deviation of health is identified by the effects on the total body. Thus a combination of mind, body, and spirit constitutes the whole entity, and nursing needs to look after all the aspects. This is not only physiological, it also has psychological aspects, and the spiritual existence of humanity also constitutes an important parameter of health. The whole of the human being has other factors that may influence or even define health. These are health beliefs, health behaviors, and cultural components of health. The whole societal existence of human being influences the expression of health and disease, and the nurse is thus not only an academic or physiologic supervisor of human being; restoration and maintenance of health by nursing also should take care of cultural spheres of the human existence. Human body has been created to live in relation with God and others. To be healthy means to live as God intends and creates us to be. A healthy life is thus a God-centered wholeness that incorporates the ideas of physical, spiritual, and psychosocial wellbeing (Piper, S., 2008). Environment: The environment has important influence on health. The environment is what surrounds the human being. This may be physical environment, biological environment, and it may even include the environment in the society. These all have implications on human health and they can modify many factors that are related to health and its expression and even its deviation. From that perspective, environment is a dynamic surrounding that changes and influences health. Moreover the environmental changes induce change in the biologic parameters of the person, and the person as a conscious entity always attempts to modify the environment towards the direction of health. In this connection, it is important to note that person has also an internal environment that is highly adaptive and is subject to changes. This is interrelated closely to external environment and both of these interexchange to implement positive and negative changes in the person. This being a very important parameter, needs to be considered while implementing care to the person (Sayers, KL and de Vries, K., 2008). Nursing: The broadly identified concerns of a discipline are defined in its metaparadigm. The metaparadigm concepts provide the boundaries and limitations of a discipline, identify the common viewpoint that all members of a discipline share, and help to focus the activities of the members of that discipline. Disciplines are distinguished from each other by differing metaparadigm concepts. Most metaparadigms consist of several major concepts. The major concepts that provide structure to the domain of nursing are person, environment, health, and nursing. These metaparadigm elements name the overall areas of concern for the nursing discipline. Each nursing theory presents a slightly different view of the metaparadigm concepts. According to these theoretical backgrounds, this would consider care of all the four elements of person as a whole, where the person will be cared for his health individually. The nursing would establish communication with the environment through health promotion by helping the person achieving environment congruent health. For this she would serve as the educator of the person within the cultural parameters. Nursing is a caring science that has art of holistic humanity integrated into it. In that sense nursing is the compassionate care for the whole person that includes provision for comfort for the dying and active concerns for the oppressed and the disenfranchised (Bunkers, SS., 2008). Reference List Bunkers, SS., (2008). The Timelessness of Nursing Theory. Nurs Sci Q; 21: 211 - 212. Carr, T., (2008). Mapping the Processes and Qualities of Spiritual Nursing Care. Qual Health Res; 18: 686 - 700. Milton, CL., (2008). The Ethics of Human Dignity: A Nursing Theoretical Perspective. Nurs Sci Q; 21: 207 - 210. Piper, S., (2008). A qualitative study exploring the relationship between nursing and health promotion language, theory and practice. Nurse Educ Today; 28(2): 186-93 Sayers, KL and de Vries, K., (2008). A Concept Development of `Being Sensitive in Nursing. Nursing Ethics, May 2008; 15: 289 - 303. Wallace, M., Campbell, S., Grossman, SC., Shea, JM., Lange, JW., and Quell, TT., (2008). Integrating spirituality into undergraduate nursing curricula. Int J Nurs Educ Scholarsh; 5: Article10. Read More