Preliminary Discussion on Nursing Theory

The first year of nursing school is where you will take one of the most crucial classes: Introduction to Nursing Theory. A wide range of perspectives on what nursing is and how it should be performed fall under the umbrella term "nursing theory." One of the many things you may learn from studying nursing theory is the many models of nursing that have been suggested throughout the years. Learning about the different ways to think about nursing might help future nurses think critically and build their own models and ways of looking at the world.

You may gain perspective on your own nursing ideas and practices by taking an introductory course in Nursing Theory, which will introduce you to the numerous models of nursing that have been presented and practiced in hospitals around the nation. In order to be a better caregiver and medical assistant, you will study the important nursing theorists of the 20th century and beyond, as well as how to construct your own models of nursing.

A Nursing Model and Its Components

The basis of every nursing theory or model rests on a number of well-established principles. Valid nursing theories involve both an approach to assessing patients' needs and a strategy for providing and evaluating the quality of care provided to those patients. A care plan may be developed using most nursing models, and it will chronicle the care a patient receives from all of the healthcare experts and employees who come into contact with them. The care plan should be flexible enough that it can be changed and reassessed every day as the patient's needs and abilities change.

The nursing model's underlying ideas will inform the development of the care plans itself. The five broad categories that care plans fall into based on the scope of elements they address are basically the five broad categories that care plans fall into.

An Overview of Nursing Theory

Traditional nursing practice centers on obeying a doctor's directions. The resulting nursing ideas were mostly biological in nature, with an emphasis on illness treatment rather than the care of individual patients. It was difficult to tailor treatment to each patient's unique requirements under these assumptions. Biomedical nursing theories make the blanket assumption that all patients with a certain condition have the same concerns and need the same treatment. These hypotheses don't take into account how different patients can be in what they know and how well they can do something. This can be because of things like their socioeconomic status, personality, or cultural background.

Conversely, social models of nursing take into account the patient from a variety of holistic perspectives. They account for individual variations in patients as a result of characteristics such as culture, socioeconomic standing, and other considerations. Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not, written in 1859, is regarded as one of the earliest nursing theorists, albeit her work is only deemed a corpus of "nursing theory" in hindsight.

A century and a half after Nightingale's death, her ideas about nursing are still shaping the field. She was the first to recognize the nurse as a caregiver in her own right, rather than just a servant following the instructions of a physician, and to recognize the nurse's ability to impact the patient's well-being via environmental and situational manipulation. Since then, several models of nursing have been presented and adopted by distinct nursing organizations and practices. Madeleine Leininger and Hildegard Peplau are two of the most well-known names in the history of nursing theory. Madeleine Leininger brought attention to the importance of cultural competence in nursing, and Hildegard Peplau proposed that nursing roles and the nurse-client relationship were important factors in the quality of care.

Implementing Concepts from Nursing Theory

As a nursing student, you will be required to familiarize yourself with and articulate numerous canons of nursing practice and theoretical frameworks. Creating and articulating your own nursing theory is a common requirement of many nursing schools. This will help you set yourself apart from other nurses when it comes time to build your own care and treatment plans. But in practice, different subspecialties within the nursing field have their own different ways of thinking.

The study of nursing theory can help you understand nursing as a profession from multiple viewpoints and can afford you the capability to begin forming your own concept of what it means to be a nurse and how your actions fit into a full plan to best care for your patients, although there is much semantic debate about whether the abundance of "nursing theory" is beneficial to the profession or splits it needlessly.