The nursing profession forms the backbone of the healthcare workforce. It aims to deliver quality nursing care to the patient, family, and the community as a whole. As a profession, it relies on philosophy to aid in critical thinking and reflection on personal values to influence professional practice. The sole purpose of this essay is to define, describe, and explain a personal philosophy of nursing that includes the perceptions of other scholars.
Factors Influencing Nursing Philosophy
Many factors influence the development of the nursing philosophy. They include education and professional experiences, perspectives and professional values, students and instructors, and cultural values (Parandeh, Khaghanizade, Mohammadi, & Nouri, 2015). For instance, Callista Roy’s Adaptation Model was influenced by her life experiences and religious values. She credits her family, teachers, mentors, and religious commitment (Smith & Parker, 2015). Her mother was a licensed vocational nurse and instilled the values of always seeking to know more about people and their care and of selfless giving as a nurse. Her teacher, Dorothy Johnson, challenged her to come up with a conceptual model that later become the famous theory. Together with her experience in nursing pediatrics, all these factors contributed to the birth of her nursing philosophy.
Concepts of the Nursing Metaparadigm
This personal philosophy describes the four concepts of nursing metaparadigm that include the person, environment, health, and nursing. In my opinion, the person is a human that constitutes a client or patient system with subsystems that interact with each other as well as the environment to influence health along the health-illness continuum. For instance, the psychological subsystem comprises of all the mental processes. Environment refers to the interaction of external and internal factors that influence the care, health, and healing of the patient. A good example is Salmonella typhi, which is an external environmental stimulus that interacts with the human system to cause typhoid. Moreover, health is a state of wellness in which the human system functions well and in harmony. The moment illness sets in, the human system malfunctions, and health are compromised. Nursing is the profession whose core function is to promote health, prevent diseases, or alleviate disease and its impacts on the human system. The profession achieves these functions through primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of prevention.
Compatible Nursing Theory
The most compatible nursing theory with this personal philosophy is Betty Neumann’s System Model. The model comprises the four concepts of the nursing metaparadigm and the theory-specific nursing process (Smith & Parker, 2015). The System Model focuses on the reaction of the client system to either the actual or potential environmental stressors and the use of primary, secondary, and tertiary levels prevention in promoting, attaining, and maintaining wellness. The definition of the concepts of the nursing metaparadigm is similar to both the system’s model and the personal philosophy to a larger extent. Both define the person as a system that interacts with the internal and external factors, the environment as surrounding factors, and health as a state of wellness. However, Neumann defines nursing as actions that help the client system to sustain optimal levels of wellness rather than a profession whose responsibility is to execute these actions, the way it is in this personal philosophy.
Conclusion
Factors that influence nursing philosophy include professional and life experiences, education, students and instructors, and cultural factors among many others. The personal philosophy contains four nursing meta paradigms that include the person, environment, health, and nursing. All these nursing concepts are interrelated. This philosophy is compatible with Betty Neumann’s System Model.
References
Smith, M. C., & Parker, M. E. (2015). Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice. Philadelphia: FA Davis.
Parandeh, A., Khaghanizade, M., Mohammadi, E., & Nouri, J. M. (2015). Factors influencing development of professional values among nursing students and instructors: A systematic review. Global Journal of Health Science, 7(2), 284–293.