Personal nursing philosophy and contemporary practice

Personal Nursing Philosophy

Throughout the history of nursing, from its origins in the dressing of ancient battle wounds to the founding of contemporary nursing practices in the 19th century, nursing has always played a significant role in the lives of all people. The care provided by nurses is traditionally related to physical preservation and comfort, thus the nursing position has customarily been connected to humanistic healthcare that nurtures, supports and comforts patients. My personal philosophy of nursing is based on the belief that a human being's personal health and their physical environment are inherently linked, because a person is affected every day by environmental influences, including secondhand smoke, genetically modified food, and poorly made cosmetics. The health of every human being can be seriously affected, both directly and indirectly, by external factors in their own environment. Thus, the nursing care every patient receives should be adapted for that individual, because nursing care is the fundamental tool used to help people reorganize their automatically programmed responses to life situations, so that they can ultimately regain a functional level of health. As Nobel Laureate Richard Schrock said of the subject, "philosophy is an attitude toward life and reality that evolves from each nurse's beliefs" (Edwards, 1997).

Florence Nightingale, who paved the way for modern nursing as we know it today by establishing the first nursing school at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860, defined nursing in her famous notes on the profession as "the act of utilizing the environment of the patient to assist him to recovery" (Nightingale, 1860). I share Nightingale's firm belief that nursing represents a bridge between the living and the sick as infinite and eternal beings. I believe the most important part of contemporary nursing theory is keeping the focus on the patient, and caring for him or her as fellow human being. The best nurses today are capable of delivering high-quality medical care while also remembering always that, because each individual leaves their own footprint, they each deserve personalized nursing care. The same nursing techniques cannot be applied to different people to achieve the same result, as every patient is a unique person with their own needs and desires to reach health and happiness.

As a nurse, there are also many other factors to consider when caring for the sick, such as my client's personal values, their family's concerns, and the circumstances of their life which may affect their health. These factors can definitely play an important role in a patient's overall health and their eventual recovery from illness or injury, because they are capable of undermining someone's physical and mental health. Multiple scientific studies have shown that a patient undergoing medical treatment inevitably has uniquely personalized concerns, which are typically associated with their symptoms. For example, a patient with failing eyesight will likely place a high value on improving their ability to see, patients suffering from chronic pain will value physical comfort, and the patient coping with depression will benefit from nurses who display genuine empathy through their care. A highly trained nurse is similar to a cutting edge computer system: it can be set to operate in nearly perfect fashion, but if you program it with faulty data you will get faulty results. A well qualified, experienced and professional nurse bases their value system on the knowledge they absorbed in nursing school, past experiences from hands-on training, and the thousands of pages of medical research that has been programmed into their minds like a computer.

There are literally thousands of environmental factors which directly and indirectly affect human health, from "the air we breathe, the climate or weather we experience, the food we eat, the water we drink;" every aspect of the environment in which we live affects the human body's proper functioning in one way or another. Sudden changes or imbalances in a person's physical environment will affect the individual greatly because diverse environmental factors affect the distribution, severity, diversity and persistence of diseases process and other health effects. For example, in developed countries, malaria kills one million people every year, and people that live in the most polluted cities are lost because of chronic exposure to pollution. Thus environmental matter and nurses are directly involved in providing a biologically safe environment because microorganism are 'present everywhere in water, soil, and on body surfaces that can develop and affect others human being when given the opportunity. That is why human health and environment is very important as it reflect the person ability to adapt to his or her environment and to sustain a happier and active life without disease or infirmity.