Personal Nursing Philosophy - Essay Example

? CONCEPT SYNTHESIS PAPER ON PERSONAL NURSING PHILOSOPHY and number: submitted: CONCEPT SYNTHESIS PAPER ON PERSONAL NURSING PHILOSOPHY The Four Metaparadigms There are four major metaparadigms of professional nursing, which are identified as follows: Person: The person is generally the service user who depends on health care service providers, including all professional health care experts for improved health and wellbeing. The patient, also referred to in some quarters as the subject is certainly a sick person, who wants to receive health (Kochut et al, 2003). This paradigm came about as a result of the realization that all people are unique and autonomous and deserve a very high level of treatment that ensures that they receive the best of care (Cardoso, Sheth and Miller, 2002). With the understanding that the paradigms refer to a generalized concept in nursing practice, the patient can best be likened to a customer of a supermarket, whose input into the supermarket through purchases made determines the level of profit that the supermarket will make. In the context of nursing practice, this paradigm was employed by cherishing the patient as the source of her profitability. Profitability used in this context however does not refer to monetary profit but an inner joy and satisfaction that the nurse will receive for providing care to the sick person and thereby bringing healing. Nursing: In most literature of nursing practice, the paradigm of nursing has been equated to caring, which makes the definition of nursing fit as a hands-on support that is delivered from a nurse or a health professional to a patient, based on medical interventions (Yong, 1998). This paradigm may be said to be a multi-variant paradigm meaning it has several aspects and scopes. For example nursing encompasses the task of a nursing professional to offer help to people and also to help reduce suffering and pain among people. Nursing as a paradigm has therefore been said to have come about as a result of the fundamental reason that people train to be nurses. This means that nursing is rooted in the need for a practicing nurse to seek the wellbeing and improved health of her patient as his or her sole source of satisfaction and reward (Walker et al, 19990). This paradigm was therefore used or employed by making attempts to serve humanity through professional application of medical health. Health: Health has been explained to be a relative state of wellness and wellbeing (Lynn and Oliver, 2003). The term relative is used to depict two major ideas. The first is that health can be interpreted from different perspectives according to the person needing it. A typical example of this is two patients, one of whom is suffering from cancer and the other from malaria. For the patient suffering from cancer may deem a day that he finds himself alive and in less pain as a day that health was achieved. The other patient suffering malaria would also find a day he achieved health as one in which the symptoms of cold and fever were down for him. The other idea of health as being relative is that health is measurable. This means that a person can rate health such as being good, better, best, bad, worse, and so on. This paradigm was employed as a concept of ensuring equality in the provision of health care to people so that at the end of the day, all can enjoy some level of health delivery. Environment: The Environment has been explained to be an embodiment of everything that to the recovery of the patient (Pender et al, 1990). This means that the environment is basically every health and medical phenomenon around the patient. This may therefore include both logistics and human resource. Logistics may refer to the availability of medicines, standardized patient beds, laboratory services, and other tangible materials used in the delivery of health care. Human resources on the other hand may refer to people like laboratory technicians, nurses, doctors, pharmacists and ward attendants. In some context of nursing literature, the environment has even been explained to include such abstract concepts as mental state and home life (Lynn and Oliver, 2003). Generally, this paradigm was used in defining the scope of my nursing practice where the need to expand my professional practice beyond certain standards was clearly outlined. A typical example of the scope was the need to be ready to offer professional nursing support to a person where and when health care was needed, without waiting to be on official duties at the hospital. Two Practice-Specific Concepts Nurses have long used practice-specific concepts to guide the perceptions and philosophies that will guide their professional practice, and would serve as a means of measuring their personal effectiveness and output of work. In my case, two of such practice-specific concepts that have shaped my philosophy in nursing and as a professional nurse are ethics and holism. Ethics: Ethics has been identified to have a multi-dimensional approach to practice. This is because it could be found to refer to right and wrong, and good and bad conduct, all found with traditions of belief at the personal, professional and institutional levels of practice (Lynn and Oliver, 2003). As a person, I pride myself in knowing the good from the bad and striving to live according to good conduct that is expressed in my professional and institutional standards. The reason for this is that the nature and level to which I practice ethical nursing determines, to a very large extent, the level of satisfaction that I shall give to my patients and other people with whom I have interactions. This is because various professional and organizational ethical standards that are set are set in accordance with patient satisfaction principles. But even more to the professional and institutional ethical standards in place, I have always tried to have my personal standards with which I practice and give care. With these personal ethical standards, I am always prompted by my own instincts to level above reproach and above certain standards of practice. Holism: Holism may be referred to as the concept of viewing health care from several aspects of a person’s life including emotional, mental, physical and spiritual (Stromborg et al, 1990). With holism, I am always empowered as a nurse not to look at only the physical dimension of care and health for my patients. In my personal opinion, holism helps in making me a more effective nurse because it has created a concept where I do not tend to be a half-baked nurse but a wholly or fully baked nurse. Finally, I can confidently say that I now have a better understanding of the total make up of a person as an integrated whole who is made up of independent parts that must all be satisfied if my work as a nurse can be said to be complete. List of Propositions: 1. Each person has a unique ability to undertake self regulation of their health, and an assessment of their capabilities towards achievement of health. 2. All persons would want to view the direction of their health towards a point that they cherish as value positivity, and consequently attempt to achieve these to bring a balance in their lives. 3. Even though the environment has been defined to be very large and including almost every influence of health around the patient, the health professional constitutes the most important part of this environment. 4. The possibility of achieving enhanced commitment and action towards ones health is directly proportional to the level of position emotion possessed by the person. 5. There must be an interpersonal influence to increase commitment for patients to be engaged in health promoting behavior but this can come about if families, peers and service providers are all ready to be part of the chain of interpersonal influence. References Cardoso, J., Sheth A. And Miller J. (2002): Workflow quality of service. International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology and International Enterprise Modeling Conference (ICEIMT/IEMC’02), Valencia, Spain, Kluwer Publishers. Kochut, K. J., Sheth, A. P., Miller, J. A., Arpinar, I. B. And Cardoso, J. (2003): IntelliGEN: A distributed workflow system for discovering protein-protein interactions, Distributed and Parallel Databases, An International Journal, Special Issue on Bioinformatics, 13(1): 43–72 Lynn B. and Oliver S. (2003). Theory and Practice of Nursing: An Integrated Approach to Caring Practice. New York: Pengium Press. Pender, N.J., Walker, S.N., Stromborg, M.F., & Sechrist, K.R. (1990). Predicting health-promoting lifestyles in the workplace. Nursing Research. 39 (6), 326-332. Stromborg, M. F., Pender, N. J., Walker, S. N., & Sechrist, K. R. (1990). Determinants of health-promoting lifestyle in ambulatory cancer patients. Social Science and Medicine. 31 (10), 1159-1168. Walker, S.N., Kerr, M.J., Pender, N. J. & Sechrist, K.R. (1990) A Spanish version of the health-promoting lifestyle profile. Nursing Research, 39, 268-273. Yong, J. (1998): The respository system of METEOR workflow management system. M.Sc. Thesis. 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