Globally, individuals are faced with different health issues, and it is through nursing that solutions are identified and utilized toward a healthy nation. Nursing is defined as the ability to care for sick or well, families, communities, and groups focusing on attaining, maintaining, and improving health. Nursing is a profession that is practiced with passion and respect toward human life. Nursing activities such as acute treatment decision-making, providing inoculations in school, long-term monitoring of a patient, and describing better healing options make nursing an interesting profession. The nursing profession deals with challenges such as monitoring and caring for critical cases, hence the ability to innovate on strategies toward solving the problem. With the help of health professionals, nurses are capable of delivering healthcare services to the community in the required manner.
Overall, there is no doubt that a wide variety of people around the world find themselves interested in joining the profession. Bound by specific social preconceptions and cultural backgrounds, however, individuals tend to create their image of the nursing profession. Nevertheless, the essential core of nursing, the discussion of which cannot be ignored, includes elements of critical thinking that any nurse must possess. Critical thinking allows one to make strategically correct and fair decisions in crises and helps to maintain professional open-mindedness and objectivity (Carvalho et al., 2017). While every nurse is guided by the use of codes of work ethics, the use of personal beliefs and opinions inevitably accompanies daily tasks. The best opportunity to effectively integrate the most suitable personal qualities and professional nursing principles is to introduce long-term solutions into practice that allow the human resource’s full potential to be realized. In the end, deep development of nursing philosophy systems enables optimization of clinical work processes by identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities for a more effective care experience.
Nursing Definition
In healthcare set up, nursing is defined as promotion of health, prevention of diseases as well as caring for the ill, the dead, and the disabled. Nursing encompasses collaborative and sovereign care of individuals from all nations, of all ages, sick, families, groups as well as communities. American Nursing Association, ANA, defines nursing as a glue that holds a patient’s healing journey all together (“What is nursing,” n.d.). As long as there are people in need of healthcare services, nurses should work toward the healing process, or in other words, improve health outcomes. However, nursing is an art and a science, comprising of both heart and mind. It is in the nurse’s heart that lies essential respect for patient’s dignity as well as a perception for patients’ needs. Thus, for nursing practice, the symbiosis of mind and heart work determines effective treatment for the patient: the mind must guide the professional’s emotional states to achieve the desired results.
Meanwhile, nursing care can be determined as the ability to care for the elderly in society. Old people require necessary and proper care accorded to them as per their needs. However, nursing is defined as a profession categorized under the healthcare sector aimed at caring for families and the communities at large with the goal to attain, maintain and recover from illnesses. The practice comprises of a unique function; helping people, whether sick or well, in activities that result in health or recovery. Nursing entails caring for individuals until the time they can perform independently with the necessary strength, will, skill and knowledge. In addition, nursing is explained by the ability to innovate methodologies toward a successful healthcare process. It is through that practice that strategies are improvised for purposes to deal with numerous and challenging health issues.
Nursing Activities
Nurses have numerous responsibilities, including communicating with both patients and physicians, caring for patients and administering medications, and performing clinical reviews of critical physiological patient data. Around the world, nurses play an essential role in health care settings and enjoy numerous employment opportunities. As well, nurses need to be intelligent, educated, skilled, and adaptive in critical thinking through monitoring and evaluating patients. Nurses are obligated with the duty to communicate with other specialists to ensure patients are appropriately treated and on the right track toward recovery. On a typical day, these are some of the activities nurses generally do: taking detailed medical histories, performing physical exams, providing counseling and medical education to the patient, listening to them, and analyzing their physical and emotional components of pain. In addition, the skilled nurse administers care coordination with other health care providers and specialists, strives to meet critical patient needs, takes blood and bodily fluid samples for tests, provides ongoing accompaniment on treatment and recovery plans and implements the best health care option.
Nurses offer counseling to patients regarding the best methods of treatment before conducting any treatment. It is the nurse’s responsibility to make sure that patients understand the treatment plan and why it is necessary at that particular moment. A patient’s emotional needs may arise from pain in their body, so nurses have a responsibility to show care through appropriate counseling and comforting words. It is through nurses that patients have hope for their life. The recovery journey might not be easy, but through a word of encouragement, a patient might feel there are people who still care. Nurses have an obligation to check on patient’s unique needs, such as lack of basic needs. On the other hand, nurses care for patients, draw blood and perform other tests, and keep detailed medical histories. Thus, nurses need to understand the patient’s medical history. Cases involving diabetes, hypertension, and high blood pressure must be reviewed before any treatment plan can be addressed. Consequently, a patient’s medical history offers a guide to issues related to other conditions, hence the ability to make a conclusion about a treatment plan. In addition, the ability to communicate and consult with other specialists is highly recommended for broad discussion, hence achieving recovery through the effective implementation of teamwork.
Importance of Philosophy
Philosophy is seen as an essential factor in nursing practice because it is a natural extension of human interest. The system of views formed helps to identify different methodologies for making sense of knowledge about practice, as well as approaches to implementing professional competencies and skills. Philosophy plays a vital role in helping nurses as professionals to determine the truth about nursing. In difficult times and prosperous days of nursing practice, it is what professionals think about nursing that brings them back to the profession every day. Nursing becomes interesting by practicing what someone thinks is right while avoiding controversy. Among the issues concerning the importance of philosophy are the following:
Identifying Deception
Philosophy helps identify deception, in which nurses are able to distinguish truth from dishonesty. The ability to identify deception in the nursing sector creates opportunities to provide health care services in a recommended manner. There are times when patients offer incorrect information, making it challenging to analyze the correct treatment procedure. Consequently, the philosophy allows nurses who can recognize deception to focus on eradicating it. In addition, nurses understand that resorting to deception in response to a patient can hurt the patient’s feelings and thus inhibit the entire healing process.
Being Reasonable
Nurses use philosophy to be reasonable and to develop ideas in a positive way. In addition, philosophy can be taught in areas related to the study of knowledge and logic specialization. For instance, among errors, fallacies that make people’s actions objectively unreasonable are of great importance. The use of nursing philosophy addresses this problem through a series of procedures that prevent biases and delusions from becoming entrenched. On the other hand, there are professional errors made by the nurse that act as a significant barrier to achieving health care goals. Mindful thinking enables nurses to develop ideas that contribute positively to the industry. In addition, learning to be more reasonable in nursing can help to understand formal arguments while avoiding errors. The more nurses engage in writing philosophy, reading philosophical materials, and engaging in philosophical discussions, the more they acquire relevant knowledge. In doing so, philosophy in nursing requires those concerned to continue practicing for better outcomes even after formal training is completed. In addition, reasoning allows nurses to engage in critical thinking, especially in complex situations.
Philosophy Helps in Understanding the History of Thought
Moreover, philosophy helps to understand the evolution of thought, which means that nurses have the opportunity to understand why events in health care happen the way they do. Indeed, it is difficult for nurses to understand science without basically tracing back to where it all began. Thus, past events, correctly documented in health chronicle, offer nurses a wide range of information and, therefore, the ability to connect with the past and understand current events. Consequently, knowledge of history of philosophy is recommended in the health care sector worldwide.
Philosophy Enables Creativity
In addition, creativity is a necessity in nursing because it is used to come up with new ideas when faced with challenges. Philosophical nurses easily navigate critical health care issues. Because nursing practice encompasses a variety of categories, and each strives to find the best option, it is recommended that nurses focus on developing unique ideas. Problem-solving is minimized, especially in situations where professionals work as a team to mobilize new ideas. Organizations such as hospitals, clinics, and schools have different problems on a daily basis, so the nurse has a responsibility to ensure that health-related issues are handled according to need. Thus, creative thinking offers the best opportunity to solve current problems.
Making the world a better Place
Philosophy can be used to make the world a better place, rationalizing between the moral and the immoral. Lack of knowledge and reasonableness is part of the culture of nursing, no one is perfect, so it is acceptable to make mistakes because one is willing to learn and make adjustments along with it. In addition, philosophy guides nursing in the right direction. As long as one continues to do the right thing, at the right time and in the right place, one will be motivated to take another chance on professional practice. Striving to achieve the best by providing the best medical services creates a supportive environment for the parties involved in therapeutic or wellness procedures.
Personal and Nursing Values in Connection to the Society
In order to practice ethics, nurses must understand their own values. Personal values are defined as the values internalized by the society the nurse comes from. Both personal values and nursing values are essential because they help influence decisions, actions, and ethical decision-making. On the other hand, nurses’ values include human dignity, altruism, autonomy, integrity, social justice, and honesty. Thus, nurses value and respect societal principles along with nursing values in order to provide the highest quality of health care in accordance with client requirements.
Linking Philosophy and Practice
A preliminary discussion of the theoretical perspectives that shape philosophical systems in the context of nursing was key to conducting academic reflection. An equally important step, however, was considered to be identifying the degree of alignment between the implementation of the intended goals and principles and expectations of professional practice. Thus, scenarios in which a qualified nurse tends to view altruism and collaboration as the foundation of nursing, but demonstrates the exact opposite patterns in clinical practice, should be ruled out. This section briefly highlights the relationship between my philosophy as a nurse, discussed earlier, and my knowledge and experience.
It is paramount to note that, as part of my master’s degree, I did not have much practice in real clinical settings, and therefore the bulk of my professional work will be realized after I graduate from the University. Nevertheless, even for those episodes of practice that I already had, I competently translate the principles of my philosophy into reality. My frame of reference recognizes that at the center of professional practice is a respectful attitude toward the patient and a full appreciation of the individual’s cultural and historical context. Thus, I have tried to demonstrate only positive patterns while doing the job and to putting the interests of the patient, including a reluctance to take certain medications or a need for a special diet, ahead of work instructions. As a practically qualified nurse, I have duly mastered critical thinking skills, so I understand that there are no dead ends: there are tradeoffs between the individual’s needs and the desire for more effective therapy, the search for which defines my professionalism.
On the other hand, in the practices of interaction with clients, it is necessary to reach a complete understanding and to make sure that their level of trust in me is high. A conscious departure from formal requirements and the search for a unique approach to the individual have been defined within my philosophy, and therefore it seems that the realization of these directions is highly desirable. Simultaneously, a patient’s trust can be built through an in-depth study of their environment, as Florence Nightingale’s theory indicates (AliSher et al., 2019). More specifically, through a critical examination of the patient’s family, culture, and friends, it is possible to determine their range of interests and, therefore, better personalize treatment.
Meanwhile, one cannot rule out the possibility of clinical error, initiated either by chance, a professional’s lack of knowledge, or the patient’s conscious desire to hide the truth. Regardless of the source of the error, the error becomes a severe impediment to optimizing recovery, and thus its elimination is a priority. As part of my clinical practice, I strive to use interprofessional consultation when I cannot be sure of my own decisions (Lee et al., 2017). Help from a colleague, senior nurse, or physician should be seen as natural, and therefore seeking counseling should not cause negative feelings.
Development Strategies
In a professional context, it seems evident that the pursuit of continual growth and development are critical components of a competent and successful professional. This reasoning holds true in all fields, including the nursing industry. As a qualified clinical staff member, I will continue to learn and develop my skills even after I graduate, which means that my professional development will not stop. Within the next five years, I want to take a leadership position in a clinical organization.
It seems evident that such a long-term goal will require much effort from me since, in five years, I have to go all the way from a master’s degree graduate to a formal leadership position. Nevertheless, I am confident that I am sufficiently proactive and competent to achieve the desired result. First and foremost, I should prove myself as an active and trained employee who can handle the tasks at hand. In addition, I will strive to take on a little more responsibility so that I can not only meet current challenges but also expand my range of opportunities. Building positive and trusting relationships with line colleagues and administrators is also an integral part of my strategy, as holding a leadership position is impossible without recognition from employees (Haque et al., 2020). Finally, only through proper and consistent management of my own creativity, effort, and motivation can I achieve my desired goal.
References
AliSher, A. N., Atta, S., Yasin, I., & Sohail, M. A. (2019). Clinical application of Nightingale’s theory. International Journal of Nursing Care, 7(1), 13-16. Web.
Carvalho, D. P., Azevedo, I. C., Cruz, G. K., Mafra, G. A., Rego, A. L., Vitor, A. F., & JĂşnior, M. A. F. (2017). Strategies used for the promotion of critical thinking in nursing undergraduate education: a systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 57, 103-107. Web.
Haque, M. D., Liu, L., & Titi Amayah, A. (2020). The Relationship Between Vision and Organizational Readiness for Change: The Mediating effects of empowerment and trust in the leader. Journal of Organizational Psychology, 20(2), 159-174. Web.
Lee, H., Kim, A., Meong, A., & Seo, M. (2017). Pediatric nurse practitioners’ clinical competencies and knowing patterns in nursing: Focus group interviews. Contemporary Nurse, 53(5), 515-523. Web.
What is nursing? (n.d.). ANA. Web.