Personal Nursing Philosophy: Environment, Health, and Care

Introduction: The Foundation of a Nursing Philosophy

Throughout the history of nursing — from its origins in dressing 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, and the nursing profession 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 and the Patient-Centered Approach

Florence Nightingale, who paved the way for modern nursing 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 a fellow human being. The best nurses today are capable of delivering high-quality medical care while also remembering that, because each individual leaves their own footprint, each patient deserves personalized 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 in reaching health and happiness.

Individualized Care and Patient Values

As a nurse, there are many other factors to consider when caring for the sick, such as a client's personal values, their family's concerns, and the circumstances of their life that may affect their health. These factors can 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 well-being.

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 wealth of medical research that has been programmed into their minds over years of practice.