Personal advanced practice nursing philosophy and core dimensions

Personal Advanced Practice Nursing Philosophy

Contemporary nursing comprises multiple dimensions of health, person, environment, and the concept of nursing at every level, especially in advanced practice. In general, health refers to the evidenced-based understanding of human health and welfare in terms of potential threats to human wellness and empirically demonstrated approaches to minimizing their toll on the individual as well as on the entire human community. Person refers to the recognition that patients are individuals with unique combinations of needs, perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, values, and expectations. Environment pertains to the world external to the individual patient's physiology and, in particular, to the causal interconnectedness between aspects of the external world and the internal state of patients. Finally, nursing refers to the entire range of processes and methodologies of modern healthcare and medical science that allow advanced practice nurses to provide optimal benefit to their patients by incorporating all elements of health, personhood, and the environment in the realm of patient care.

Health

The 20th century witnessed a profound degree of advancement in the scientific understanding of human health and disease. In less than 100 years, medical science provided the comprehensive understanding of almost all of the major threats to human health, in addition to perfecting complex surgical procedures and other medical procedures and technologies that would have been beyond even the most optimistic expectations of Western physicians from previous eras of medicine. Today, evidence-based research provides a framework for healthcare that has greatly increased life expectancy and other objective measures of relative human wellness and avoidance, resistance to, and ability to recover from disease. That evidence-based practice forms the cornerstone of advanced practice nursing.

Environment

The scientific evidence-based aspects of modern nursing also incorporate the substantial influence of the external environment on both individual human health and on community health of large patient populations. In principle, much of human disease is at least partly a function of external influences. Therefore, the modern concept of advanced practice nursing emphasizes the recognition and mitigation of those external threats to human health, largely through community health modalities and through the additional patient education and counseling responsibilities of contemporary advanced practice nurses.

Nursing

Nursing encompasses all of the direct and indirect healthcare responsibilities within the range of the professional nurse-patient relationship. While it is built on medical science, nursing is also an art in the manner in which it entails the ability to understand patients as unique individuals. Ultimately, effective advanced practice nursing requires even greater substantive knowledge and clinical capabilities, recognition of the importance of the fundamental commitment to human health and welfare from the unique perspective and needs of every individual patient, and a conceptual understanding of how to recognize and help patients mitigate the potential negative health consequences of their external environments.