The primary goal of every nurse is to provide high-quality care to all patients. Other goals and objectives vary from one healthcare provider to the other. There are several factors a nurse would consider before developing a personal nursing philosophy. The factors include practice beliefs and values of the role models, individual experience, practice environment, and leadership traits of nursing educators, preceptors, the supervisor and learning sessions. Nursing practice beliefs, values, and philosophies are developed over a period of time. They are developed from various nursing concepts and theories, as will be illustrated in this assignment.
Autobiography
I was not sure whether I wanted to be a nurse in my childhood. However, I took a keen interest in helping people, and I knew that I would make a good healthcare provider. My aunty worked in a nearby healthcare facility as a nurse, and I admired the compassion with which she did her work. She became my role model since the time I decided that I want to be pursuing nursing as a profession when done with high school. Nursing is a noble profession that requires a blend of sufficient knowledge, skills, and experience to be able to meet patients’ needs. It is also a learning opportunity where one gets to understand other people better with the aim of improving their health conditions. As a nurse, I have been able to learn and appreciate the diversity that exists in healthcare. I have also learned how to continually evaluate myself and improve my nursing traits to become a better nurse. As a nurse, I get to meet new people almost daily, and each encounter provides a learning opportunity. Nursing environments lead to the acquisition of new information daily ( Deliktas, Korukcu, Aydin, & Kabukcuoglu, 2019) . Some of the new information is crucial in developing clinical judgment.
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The Four Metaparadigms
Nursing has developed to become a fully established professional field. It has many fields of specialization and nurses have one goal of improving patients’ care outcomes ( Bender, 2018) . Patients have different care needs that they would want healthcare providers to meet satisfactorily. Nurses providing care to the patients must be well prepared by acquiring the relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities to be able to meet the patients’ needs. Every nurse needs a unique work philosophy that acts as the baseline for the nurse’s service provision ( Nikfarid, Hekmat, Vedad, & Rajabi, 2018) . There are four universal paradigms that provide guidelines to the nursing students and even practicing nurses. These paradigms act as a platform upon which clinical judgments and decisions are made. They include the person, the environment, health, and nursing practice (Bender, 2018).
The Person
I define a person as a distinct individual with a unique personality and specific traits that contributes to decision-making in healthcare-related matters. In healthcare environments, the person concept refers to the patient seeking health care. A person has the autonomy to choose a preferred healthcare medium or method. The autonomy also enables patients to be integral part of their care processes (Bender, 2018). Different individual factors determine the effectiveness of the patients’ involvement in their care processes. Some of them include the person’s health condition, awareness level, and education level. Nurses need to educate patients on their health conditions to improve the treatment outcomes.
The person component of the four metaparadigms focuses on an individual’s needs and expectations from the care process. They include the healthcare requirement by the individual, spiritual needs, and, most importantly, the connections to one's families and other groups that patients consider important to his health. The health status of any individual is a result of an interaction between the physical and social aspects of a person’s life. According to Marchuk (2014) , the standards of helices, resonance, and integrality are essential in creating a unitary individual. Marchuk’s philosophy and science of human nurturing consider the person concept as a distinctive soul characterized by the solidarity of the brain, nature, and body. Deliktas et al. add that the person concept describes the individual who seeks nursing care and has three distinct segments, which are the biological, physiological, and spiritual components (2019).
In my experience as a nurse, I have learned how important the person concept is to the nursing care provision. Factors such as low self-esteem, reduced self-regard, stress, and anxiety by the person seeking healthcare can lead to reduced care outcomes ( Marchuk, 2014) . Patients who are not at ease take a longer time to recover. Therefore, it is the responsibility of nurses to assure the patients that they will be okay and to take a holistic approach in the care process to bring calmness and certainty during treatment. My approach has been to assess the patient’s needs and individual settings. I also use my socialization strengths to establish a healthy relationship and trust with my patients to be able to understand them better and help them to achieve the required calmness. An individual is hugely influenced by circumstances, hereditary aspects of the body, transience, and own worries ( Deliktas et al., 2019) . Therefore, nurses should aim at establishing these factors and correcting them to ensure that the person is able to attain the desired health status.
The Environment
An environment refers to the immediate surrounding of an individual. In this case, the environment refers to both external and internal factors that surround the patients and determine their health condition as well as recovery process ( Bender and Feldman, 2015) . They include economic status, social factors, cultural beliefs and values, hygiene, and behaviors of people living with or near the patients. These environmental factors interact with the patients’ susceptibility to cause or prevent illnesses ( Marchuk, 2014) . The environment is, therefore, an important concept that helps to determine the patients’ health conditions and used to develop both short-term and long-term care plans.
According to Bender and Feldman (2015) , peoples’ health conditions are constantly influenced by how they interact with the immediate environments. There are environmental conditions that promote healthy living, while other conditions cause diseases or worsen patients’ health. Besides the physical environment, there are other environmental aspects that determine the health of an individual. They include cultural, geographical location and monetary factors that surround the patient. Marchuk’s Adaptation Model indicates how a person’s surrounding incorporates natural resources and can be used to impact patients’ health by helping the patients to modify their environments ( Nikfarid et al., 2018) . In the case, here are some environmental conditions that cannot change, the patient is encouraged and helped to adapt to the environment. Adjustment models provide frameworks and procedures within which the patient and healthcare providers can work to help in reducing the effects of perceived unhealthy conditions.
I have learned that my nursing role requires me to take a holistic approach when providing care to every patient. The approach involves looking factors beyond patients’ presenting illnesses ( Marchuk, 2014) . I understand that a patient’s health is a result of a combination of several patient factors. Among these factors, the environment is among the essential determinants of health. My nursing philosophy involves treating the presenting illness as well as ensuring that my patient recovers fully, and the chances of the disease reoccurring are reduced. Therefore, I include the patients’ environmental factors when taking a medical history and consider them when designing long-term care plans.
The Health Component
I define health as the overall well-being of an individual. A person is either healthy or unhealthy depending on the presenting conditions, signs, and symptoms. According to Nikfarid et al. (2018) , the term health is relative and has no specific definition. Being healthy or unhealthy depends on an individual’s definition of health. Also, a condition that can be described as unhealthy in one person can also mean complete well-being in another person. Health is usually interplay of several other factors that combine within the patient to determine whether a person is healthy or not. For example, it requires several risk factors to combine together and cause obesity in an individual. One might have the obesity gene but fails to show symptoms of the disease.
The health component indicates the general well-being of an individual. It is also affected by several other factors as people living in the same environment, exposed to similar factors, tend to have different disease prevalence ( Nikfarid et al., 2018) . In the same way, people with similar genetic predispositions have different health status and conditions. According to Benner’s nursing philosophy, individuals’ genetic compositions increase their vulnerabilities to some specific diseases. However, it requires the interplay of more than one factor and secondary agents of the illness to manifest ( Bender & Feldman, 2015) . This explains why it is common to have patients with diseases in their asymptomatic stage; while the individuals cannot comprehend that they are sick. According to Watson’s definition, health refers to wholeness, harmony, and comfort. Roger’s definition is slightly different as it classifies health and illness as part of a continuum. However, it is important to understand that health is a relative term because a set of conditions that are considered to be healthy in one person may indicate poor health in another person.
Nursing Component
Nursing practice refers to the process of delivering care to patients before, during, and after their visit to healthcare facilities. Nursing is an involving and wide profession with different categories of nurses working in various specialties to improve patients’ health conditions. I would define nursing process as the act of restoring and improving patients’ health. It starts from prevention of diseases. Here, nurses are involved in regular nursing research to find effective techniques of preventing illnesses before they occur ( Nikfarid et al., 2018) . After patients are discharged, nursing continues to monitor healing process and to ensure that the illnesses never reoccur. Nurses use their knowledge, skills, and experience to provide the best possible nursing care.
This component involves the delivery of optimum and high-quality care services to patients to achieve the desired outcomes. This component begins but not limited to the moment a patient visits a healthcare facility to the time of full recovery. In between, the care process involves taking the patient’s medical history, diagnosis, therapeutic interventions, and other nursing interventions to help the patients regain their health status. Nursing also involves preventing diseases before they occur. This function is achieved through analysis and study of diseases’ risk factors and managing them before they lead to actual illnesses ( Marchuk, 2014) . Nurses are, therefore, active participants in the care process with the aim of attaining health promotion, protection, and preservation. Their functions include helping patients through interpersonal connections and management of the care settings.
Nurses contribute to the well-being of patients. During the care process, nurses are required to make many decisions, and some of them are so critical that they might determine whether the patients’ conditions improve or deteriorate ( Bender, 2018) . Therefore, a nurse needs critical thinking skills to make appropriate clinical judgments and decisions. According to Henderson’s philosophy, the primary objective of nursing practice is to assist all individuals, sick or well, to gain independence and to perform various activities ( Nikfarid et al., 2018) . This means that nursing involves much more than caring for sick individuals. My nursing philosophy involves ensuring the well-being of populations by preventing and treating various illnesses by considering the patient, environmental, health, and nursing factors.
Two Practice-Specific Concepts
Evidence-Based Practice
One of the latest and most popular developments in nursing practice is the implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP). I define EBP as a nursing practice that relies on scientific research findings and conclusions to make care decisions. After conducting research on a healthcare issue, the results, conclusions, and recommendations are analyzed and translated into daily nursing practice. This practice approach helps nurses in making care decisions based on scientific evidence instead of relying on individual knowledge or experience. Before the EBP, nursing practice was associated with many medication errors and mistakes, and some of them could lead to adverse effects ( Bender & Feldman, 2015) . Evidence-based nursing practice has helped to reduce the errors and led to improved patient outcomes.
Health Promotion
I define health promotion as the act improving patients’ well-being especially if they have long-term illnesses. In health promotion, nurses ensure that the patients are as comfortable as possible and the negative impacts of their illnesses are minimized. The second practice-specific concept is to promote the populations’ health. Nurses use their skills and experience to communicate with patients who suffer from critical illnesses to lead them toward improved health conditions. Chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes have different impacts on the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of patients. They lead to poor living styles, continually deteriorating health, and affect the financial stability of the patients. These patients also need extra care from family members to continually support them through their daily chores ( Bender & Feldman, 2015) . My nursing practice when dealing with critically ill patients involves applying different nursing and personal skills to make them as comfortable as possible and to ensure that the care process prolongs their life.
List of Propositions
Propositions refer to the recommendations based on the discussed concepts and philosophy that will help nurses to improve the quality of their care to patients. The goal of nursing is to improve populations’ health through high-quality and safe care. Care approach depend on the ability to provide self-care, conduct self-evaluation, and to analyze various patient-factors causing diseases.
Self-care provision refers to nurses’ act and ability to ensure that they are in the right physical and mental health to care for others. Through self-care, nurses will be able to provide sufficient and effective care to others.
Self-evaluation helps to determine how nurses’ personal traits influence others in the nursing environment and how they can help to bring the best out of others as healthcare leaders ( Bender & Feldman, 2015) .
These four paradigms of nursing are important in any care process ( Deliktas et al., 2019) . Analyzing spiritual, emotional, physical, and societal patient factors that can contribute to the patients’ conditions will help nurses to provide better patient-centered care.
By implementing evidence-based practice, nurses will reduce common medication and care errors because most decisions will be made based on research evidence ( Bender & Feldman, 2015) .
Collaboration among nurses is key to making good clinical decisions and judgments. Nurses must ensure that they collaborate with the patients and other care providers to improve care outcomes.
Conclusion
Nursing practice is a process that involves learning and development all through. Every day at work is a learning opportunity for a nurse. Nurses do practice based on their personal philosophy and various nursing concepts developed by scholars and theorists. Nursing values are also developed from the four metaparadigms of health, person, environment, and practice. The metaparadigms are interconnected and lead to a holistic approach to providing patient care. My nursing philosophy is based on two specific concepts which include the need to implement evidence-based practice and to promote populations’ health. For example, a terminally ill patient needs to be as comfortable as possible. Nurses providing care to such a patient need to research and use evidence-based care techniques that reduce the symptoms and promote the health of the patient in return.
References
Bender, M. (2018). Re‐conceptualizing the nursing metaparadigm: Articulating the philosophical ontology of the nursing discipline that orients inquiry and practice. Nursing inquiry , 25 (3), e12243.
Bender, M., & Feldman, M. S. (2015). A practice theory approach to understanding the interdependency of nursing practice and the environment: Implications for nurse-led care delivery models. Advances in Nursing Science, 38 (2), 96-109. doi:10.1097/ANS.0000000000000068
Deliktas, A., Korukcu, O., Aydin, R., & Kabukcuoglu, K. (2019). Nursing Students' Perceptions of Nursing Metaparadigms: A Phenomenological Study. The Journal of Nursing Research , 27 (5), e45.
Marchuk, A. (2014). A personal nursing philosophy in practice. Journal of Neonatal Nursing, 20 (6), 266-273. doi:10.1016/j.jnn.2014.06.004
Nikfarid, L., Hekmat, N., Vedad, A., & Rajabi, A. (2018). The main nursing metaparadigm concepts in human caring theory and Persian mysticism: a comparative study. Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine , 11 .
