Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

Nursing Theorist: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910) is the most renowned nurse professional in modern times. In fact, she is attributed with establishing nursing as a profession and modern practice. Born in Italy to an elite British family, Florence opted to pursue a nursing career against her family’s strong opposition. As a teenager, she was an active philanthropist who ministered to the poor and ill in the villages neighboring her family’s estate. She began her professional nursing career at seventeen years of age by enrolling as a nursing student in Germany. Over the course of her lifetime, Florence made considerable effort to overhaul and sanitize the appalling healthcare conditions in Europe, and particularly in England, by speaking out, acting, and educating others (Alligood, 2022). Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

As a nursing theorist, Florence developed and presented the Environmental Theory that focuses on creating sanitary conditions for patients to get care. The theory incorporates the patient’s surrounding environment into the nursing care plan. It outlines the nurse’s role in using the patient’s environment to facilitate recovery. It identifies the environment as important in affecting individual health in positive and negative ways. Some of the environmental factors noted as significant to nursing care include light, direct sunlight, cleanliness, efficient drainage, appropriate nutrition, sufficient food, clean water, and fresh air. The absence of any of these environmental factors could delay the patient’s recovery or even reverse the care efforts. The theory emphasizes the need for nursing care to provide a quiet and warm environment for the patients to recover. Additionally, it calls for nurses to assess the dietary needs of each patient, document food intake parameters, and evaluate the effect of the diet on recovery and health (Smith, 2020). Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

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The patient environment remains an important element in nursing care. It outlines the environment of care as the context of engagement. As a nurse, a healthy environment is important for providing appropriate and effective nursing care. A healthy patient environment should be characterized by the needs of the patient being met, along with respect, trust, engagement, collaboration and communication between the nurses, patients, family members and other care providers. This creates opportunities for relationship-based care, which empowers the nurses to truly be present with the patients and families and interact with other providers to provide care that is consistent with ethical and professional mandates (Smith, 2020.

Florence Nightingale’s environmental theory guides advanced practice nursing through its contributions to critical, holistic thinking in nursing. The theory emphasizes that a nurse must use her brain, heart and hands to create a healing environment that cares for the patient’s spirit, mind and body. The holistic paradigm is with a view to a humanistic approach to the patient as a human being with an indivisible relationship with the environment (Riegel et al., 2021). Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

In practicing critical, holistic thinking, advanced practice nurses would integrate creativity, science, compassion, and holism into nursing practice. The theory provides guidance for nursing care that meets the intent of healing. This enables the nurse practitioners to recognize that the patient is more than the illness, including the environment and that nursing care should extend to the environment. This identifies the roles of advanced practice nurses as identifying each patient as an individual, acknowledging the whole patient, interacting with the patients respectfully and mindfully, assessing patients holistically through open communication, and pinpointing environmental and stress factors that impact health outcomes (Merlo & Berra, 2023). Overall, the theory helps in identifying strategies for leveraging environmental factors to improve nursing care outcomes. Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

References

Alligood, M. R. (2022). Nursing Theorists and their Work (10^th ed.). Elsevier, Inc.

Merlo, G., & Berra, K. (Eds.) (2023). Lifestyle Nursing. CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Riegel, F., Crossetti, M. D. G. O., Martini, J. G., & Nes, A. A. G. (2021). Florence Nightingale’s theory and her contributions to holistic critical thinking in nursing. Revista brasileira de enfermagem, 74(2), e20200139. https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7167-2020-0139

Smith, M. C. (2020). Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment

Nursing theories are a guide to providing best care practices. As an advanced practice nurse, it will be important to use these theories to guide your nursing practice. Whether it be Florence Nightingale providing a clean environment or Dorothea Orem’s providing care to a patient who cannot provide care for themselves. I want you to choose a nursing theorist and describe how their theory aligns with your views on healthcare. How will this theory guide you in your advanced practice career? Nursing Theories and Nursing Practice Essay Assignment