Application to practice in professional contexts

¶ … Practice

There is still a great degree of relevance found in Uustal's "Values clarification in nursing: Application to practice," despite the fact that it was written some time ago. This relevance pertains to the nursing profession and to some theoretical and practical components of performing this job. Specifically, the article's approach to the correlation of a nurse's values and his or her actions is of extreme importance today, just as much if not more so than it was when the article was first published. In this respect, the author is able to truly get to the essence of what impacts how nurses administer treatment and interact with their patient's overall, and explain it to the reader in a way that is both lucid and informative.

The crux of the article is the notion of values clarification, which is a seven step process the author advocates that helps to clarify some of the parameters pertaining to values. Those parameters are extremely germane to nursing in contemporary times, because they help to clarify the concept of values and distinguish full formed ones from those that are not. One of the most important facet of this clarification is the fact that ultimately, values are ideas which engender action. If one simply has a series of beliefs or convictions and they do not influence one's actions, then they are not values. Uustal makes the point that not only are values tenets that people base actions upon, but they are reusable in a sense that one can repeatedly make the same decisions and create the same actions simply from a careful preponderance of one's values.

Another very important aspect of this document -- which actually enables it to have continuing relevance several decades after it was written -- is its framing of the mutability of values. The author denotes in a couple of different places in the article that values are not rigid or static. Instead, they are continually changing in response to actions, events, experiences, trends, as well as the general zeitgeist in which they are formed. This part of the article means that the values for nursing that were espoused and practiced when the author composed this article may have changed for contemporary times. In fact, it implies that they must have changed, since values are formed and utilized in response to one's surroundings and the factor's that are the most important. The practical application of this concept today is that nurses should not get complacent in their values. They should continually evaluate them to determine if they still apply and how, and in what sort of ways their values can truly inform their practice.