Concept Synthesis Paper on Personal Nursing Philosophy

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Growing up as a child, there are values that I always considered paramount for humanity survival. These range from compassion, respect, caring, and professionalism. As I develop as a person and into the nursing career, these values, coupled with additional principles and ethics, have significantly shaped personal nursing philosophy that I ascribe to. I believe the primary goal of a practicing nurse is ensuring the welfare of his/her patients. To facilitate this, compassion is key. It is through compassion that a nurse can prove non-judgmental care to the patients in need regardless of their religion, disability, race, financial background, and lifestyle choices. When a nurse focuses on the patients’ needs, safety, healing and empowerment, fruitful outcomes can be expected. Dr. Duffy’s Quality-Caring model states that nurses should developed relationships that characterized by caring to promote positive outcomes to patients, other health providers, and the general health care systems (Duffy, 2018). Therefore, compassion and caring will be a critical in being the patients’ advocate, manager, teacher, leader, and delivering the highest nursing care to achieve excellent patient outcomes.

Respect and professionalism are other values that have established themselves in my nursing philosophy. Every individual ascribes to some form of belief that drives him or her in decision-making. This would apply to patients regarding a particular medication or treatment. Thus, I believe the value of respect and integrity would enable a nurse to let patients make their own decisions, and not force anything on them. Again, as the nursing profession requires teamwork, I believe respect would be key to facilitating efficient teamwork with colleagues. Over time, I have come to the belief that for one to develop in a given professional, one has to maintain a high level of professionalism. This entails abiding with the set ethical codes of conduct and recognizing the public duty to provide safe, holistic, patient-centered care. Hence the significance of respect and professionalism in my personal nursing philosophy.

Nursing incorporates four metaparadigms that govern how the profession should function. These are patient/person, nursing, health, and environment. The patient/person component depicts humans as holistic beings, multidimensional and capable of self-responsibility (Branch et al., 2016). As such, patients have different connections, especially with their social and spiritual realms. As such, nursing ought to identify the person’s connection with spiritual, physical and social needs to ensure essential outcomes. When the nurses promote the patient element, patients feel respected and empowered in managing their health with dignity and positive personal connections. The environment component entails how the surroundings affect the patient. The internal and external environment has an impact on the health and well-being of a patient. These involve interactions with friends and family, technology, economic conditions, and physical and geographic factors. It is, therefore, crucial to identify this component on every person as a nursing professional to improve the health status of patients. The nursing element incorporates advocating for optimal health outcomes for every patient (Branch et al., 2016). To accomplish this, nurses ought to establish a mutual relationship with their patients and a safe and caring environment. The nursing component requires nurses to embrace a high degree of service through the application of technology, collaboration, skills, knowledge, communication and professional judgement in their duties and responsibilities for patient well-being. The health element is a multidimensional component that involves the level of wellness and health care access a patient has. It aims to look at how genetic makeup, person’s lifespan, physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional structures influence health care benefits (Branch et al., 2016). In one way or the other, these structures influence the health and well-being of patients.

Reference

Branch, C., Deak, H., Hiner, C., & Holzwart, T. (2016). Four Nursing Metaparadigms. IU South Bend Undergraduate Research Journal, 16, 123-132.

Duffy, J. R. (2018). Quality caring in nursing and health systems: Implications for clinicians, educators, and leaders. Springer Publishing Company.