Practice holistic, Evidence-based Nursing Care

Introduction
Nurses in all settings are tasked with providing care in a caring manner with attention to all aspects of the person, health, and environment. Through uniting all risk factors that affect the health of the patient, nurses are expected to provide a holistic nursing care, which is a comprehensive model of care. A holistic approach means that the nurse is informed about a patient's whole life situation.
Discussion
Description  
Holistic care includes a wide range of approaches. Establishing appropriate education, management systems (medication, communication, and complementary treatment). For example, in one of my clinical days, I helped 83 years old woman with a history of frequent fall. She has also a history tremor in all extremity tremors. From her frequent fall, she develops a lot of pain, especially in her right shoulder. Due to all these things going on with her, she is very reluctant to get up and do some activities even going the bathroom. Since holistic nursing doesn’t depend only on traditional medicine, I started educating patient about self-care and helping them to perform her daily activities independently is part of holistic care. I had her to do some physical activities: assisted her going to the bathroom, and helped her to walk around the unit. Also, instead of providing pain medication, I asked what usually she does at home to alleviate pain and provided ice, which worked very well. Since respecting human dignity also, a part of holistic care I completely respected her wishes and allowed her to participate in decision making while we do this.  Another holistic practice I used while working with this patient was a healing presence /integrative nurse coaching. By listening deeply and being fully present with the patients, we are able to help patients and clients tap into their inner wisdom, helping them discover their path to wholeness while mitigating the illness she was experiencing it. By having a sympathetic presence, I was able to create a caring environment for the patient.
Analysis
Nursing is such a profession that requires a deep sense of humanity and a holistic approach to issues and circumstances. For example, I currently serve my patients at night shift, where I am in charge of 12 patients, and the most challenge I undergo through is handling violent patients. Contrary to daytime shift, patients usually tend to be more disturbed at night, as some of them turn violent and ready to fight. They even refuse medication, as for my case the most challenging scenario was with a patient that had to undergo some dehydration, so we had to remove some fluids from her, at the same time, she was being added blood. Unfortunately, she turned violent and started stripping off everything, she claimed we wanted to kill her, I had to call the doctor to attend for her, however late it was.
Hence, as philosophy puts it, holistic care is a sense of humanism that puts emphasis on the whole as greater than the summation of its parts, for example, a person’s mind, body, and spirit. (Jasemi et.al 2017) As a nurse, I, therefore, have to always considered my patients a whole and their environment, as well as body, spirit and mental status. In handling violent patients holistically, we need to be accommodating as possible. Though challenging because on the processes, a patient may do much harm to themselves, like in the above scenario, we had to stop various processes to wait for the doctor, which should not have been the case, however, with arrival of the doctor, various medication adjustments were made and the patient was contained. That was well done.
Subsequently, I would recommend that violent patients should be placed in a special room with emergency services and human personnel readily available to avoid cases of terminating treatments as this can only worsen the state of a patient. Thus, enhancing holistic nursing care to patients.
Evaluation and Action
As a professional nurse, one thing I have identified is that apart from various health challenges our patients are diagnosed of, for example cancer, malaria, Pneumonia or Typhoid, most of them equally undergo serious emotional distress as a result family challenges, failed relationship or even as a result of a financial deficits. These do not allow patients to respond well to treatments, thus, to help encounter such, I adopted practicing empathy and counseling while handling my patients. Creating a smooth landing zone for them to share with me the other sides of their stories has helped me understand the exact status of my patients both physiologically and psychologically. Hence providing both medication and counseling, this has been so well to me, as many patients have shown great improvements within a short timeline as compared to those who are not put to counseling. This to me, is equally part of holistic nursing care to patients as it establishes the challenges of a patient all round in order to provide assistance beyond medication alone.
Finally, achieving the objective of Practicing holistic, Evidence-based Nursing Care will enable me as a professional nurse to always conduct proper patient’s body assessment and examination, motivate my patients to share their mind as far as their problem is concerned and also their spiritual faith and belief in order to understand the patient as a whole. This will enable me to provide services and medication without infringing into patients’ physical, emotional or spiritual status.
Reference
Jasemi, M., Valizadeh, L., Zamanzadeh, V., & Keogh, B. (2017). A Concept analysis of holistic care by hybrid model. Indian journal of palliative care, 23(1), 71.