NURS 2276E Nursing

Caring can be termed as a human behavior including the affective, cognitive, psychomotor and the administrative skills within which nurse’s caring can be explained.

According to Florence Nightingale, the most important aspect of nursing is caring and over the past few decades a lot of researches are being carried on to explain what caring is. Although the concept of caring in the nursing profession is not unique, but the there is a substantial existing knowledge related to caring in nursing (Ray & Turkel, 2014). Just as the role of the nurses has changed over the years, the concept of caring have also changed with the increasing number of consumers of the health care system.

Previously the concept of nursing or caring was only confined to the assisting the physician and assisting the patients in the hospitals and the care homes. But with time, the concept of caring has evolved (Cook & Peden, 2017). Nurses are now educators, scientists and practitioners meeting the complex needs of health care consumers.

Patients and the families now require specialized knowledge, having specialized skills in managing acute and the chronic illness and injury and can prescribe medications.

Nursing concept and ontological application

The critical theory of nursing was initially established by a group of professors of the Institute of the social research. The critical theory of nursing depends upon the contextual analysis of the phenomena (Campbell & Bunting, 1991). The Nursing professionals supporting the critical theory emphasizes on the needs for improving the construction of the knowledge consisting of  a liberating purpose and emancipating purpose. The critical theory in the nursing concept implies that, once the theory has been imparted it should be put into practice for accomplishing enhanced learning from the feedback.

As per this theory the nurses should be able to push their limits, leaving behind the technical, conventional, pathocentric, submissive professional exercise. This dialectic vision of the health care science is in contradiction with the concept of health (Mosqueda-Díaz et al., 2013). The concept of critical theory emphasis on the nurses for considering the facets of the socio-cultural context while offering care to the patients, that is developing the capacity to identify the social inequalities and then mitigate them with the innovative application of the medical knowledge. The dialectic vision of the nursing helps to provide concrete answers for approaching the diverse realities (Mill et al., 2001)

The complexity theory in nursing has emerged from the mathematically based discipline of physics and is related to quantum physics. The complexity theory of nursing is a way to understand the communities and the healthcare organization. It provides a framework that that is holistic and much more realistic than the theoretical paradigm. It acknowledges the multiple determinants that influences the health. The relationships are stressed above the discreet components (Broom & Adams, 2012). As per this theory ‘caring” is an open and a dynamic and system that takes energy from the needs of the society of the nursing care.

Pattern is again a word that is used in the complexity theory and it is this theory that studies the interrelationship between the multiple components of the health care, interconnected portions weaved together to give rise to a more complex form. As per the complexity theory the nurses function in a health care system that is dynamic and is tangled within other complex systems. The concept of science is converted in to arts as the nurse develops a broad knowledge base, communication skills, hand on skills and a wide range of other components.

The concept of nursing and caring as a concept of human science emphasizes on health and life as experienced by the humans (Mitchell & Cody, 1992). Intentionality is a philosophical idea that is significant to the profession of nursing as the human science, particularly in the Parse’s human theory of becoming and the theory of human caring by Watson (Mitchell & Cody, 1992).

Ethical issues related to nursing and the ontological theories

There had been papers that have described or have questioned the “justice view” of the ethics as an appropriate approach to health care. However it is argued that the nurses necessarily do not adopt the highest degree of the impartiality linked to the justice view, instead their moral practices are reflected by their use of the care based ethics (Papastavrou et al., 2012).

Some of the common ethical issues related to nursing can be the breaching of the professional standards by inappropriate clinical governance, failing to preserve the patient’s rights and failing to protect the health and the safety of the patient.

Controversies and intersections

Some of the controversies related to the different nursing theories are that in most of the case these caring theories are so complex and the terminologies applied to each of the concepts are so abstract for the graduate nursing students, that it becomes very difficult to apply them in to clinical practice. Specifically these middle range application of the caring concepts cannot be applied to specific nursing scenarios (Fountouki & Theofanidis, 2008). Some of the terminologies and the concepts are inconsistent and is largely convoluted making extremely difficult to comprehend or apply in clinical practice. This can be of difficulty for the non-english speakers struggling to grasp the paradigms and the conceptual frameworks of nursing (Fountouki & Theofanidis, 2008)..

Ontological tradition that would suit my nursing practice

The ontological traditions that will guide my nursing practice is the critical nursing theory that emphasizes on the concept of the dialectic vision of the health care science, that emphasizes on the nurses to understand the socio-cultural aspect of care, which will help me to address the health inequalities in a community. It is this theory that will help to apply the innovative evidence based practices to address the health care needs of the community. Again this theory supports the application of new innovative technologies in health care.

References

Broom, A., & Adams, J. (2012). A critical social science of evidence-based healthcare. Evidence-based healthcare in context, critical social sciences perspectives, 1-22.

Campbell, J. C., & Bunting, S. (1991). Voices and paradigms: Perspectives on critical and feminist theory in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, 13(3), 1-15.

Cook, L. B., & Peden, A. (2017). Finding a focus for nursing: The caring concept. Advances in Nursing Science, 40(1), 12-23.

Fountouki, A., & Theofanidis, D. (2008). Nursing theory: A discussion on an ambiguous concept. International Journal of Caring Sciences, 1(1), 15-20.

Mill, J. E., Allen, M. N., & Morrow, R. A. (2001). Critical theory: Critical methodology to disciplinary foundations in nursing. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive, 33(2).

Mitchell, G. J., & Cody, W. K. (1992). Nursing knowledge and human science: Ontological and epistemological considerations. Nursing Science Quarterly, 5(2), 54-61.

Mosqueda-Díaz, A., Vílchez-Barboza, V., Valenzuela-Suazo, S., & Sanhueza-Alvarado, O. (2014). Critical theory and its contribution to the nursing discipline. Investigación y educación en enfermería, 32(2), 356-363.

Papastavrou, E., Efstathiou, G., Tsangari, H., Suhonen, R., Leino?Kilpi, H., Patiraki, E., … & Jarosova, D. (2012). A cross?cultural study of the concept of caring through behaviours: patients’ and nurses’ perspectives in six different EU countries. Journal of advanced nursing, 68(5), 1026-1037.

Ray, M. A., & Turkel, M. C. (2014). Caring as emancipatory nursing praxis: The theory of relational caring complexity. Advances in Nursing Science, 37(2), 132-146