Nursing Diagnosis - An Ultimate Guide for Nursing Students

Importance/Purpose of Nursing Theories

Across different professions, theories offer the foundation of practice. Nursing being a science, its entire practice is based on nursing theories. Nursing theories act as frameworks that shape the scope of nursing care and practice. It offers nurses guidelines when educating themselves, researching, and practicing care for their patients and themselves. There are many reasons why nursing theories are important:

• They provide a foundation for nursing practice and are essential in caring for patients. As a result, most magnet and academic hospitals consistently integrate nursing theories into their policies, SOPs, and guidelines to ensure best practice is achieved.
• Nursing institutions also use nursing theories to develop nursing curricula. Therefore, the nursing programs are designed with the concepts and models in mind. Besides, the skills that nurse students develop relate to various aspects of nursing theories.
• Nursing theories are also used in the nursing research process. They guide the research process by creating and testing a phenomenon of interest among a given population of interest. Such research enables nursing to address societal challenges and continuously offer means to advance caring through infusing theory, practice, and research. It promotes theory or evidence-based practice.
• Nursing theories are useful in generating concepts of efficient and effective care in the professional practice domain. Therefore, nurses in clinical practice can apply concepts and frameworks from these theories in critical clinical decision-making. It also helps nurses advocate for themselves and their patients. They shape nursing strategies.
• The theories define nursing as helping nurses to accept themselves, their roles, and their purpose in care settings.
• They also offer a foundation for nursing education by generating further knowledge and indicating the correct direction nurses should pursue in personal and professional development.
• Nursing theories also help maintain professional limits and boundaries.
• The theories offer a sense of identity that helps patients, nurses, managers, and other healthcare practitioners to acknowledge and understand the place of nurses and nursing in society.
• They also determine the information nurses gather, help nurses anticipate patient responses, and identify who needs care.
• Theories also help nurses articulate what they do for the patients and its rationale.
• They help nurses establish best practices, select productive research areas, determine the best interventions, and map out objectives and expected outcomes.
• Nursing theories can also influence the choice and development of PICOT questions.

Nursing theory, to a broader scope, helps knit together the systems, people, and settings in healthcare to influence nursing practice, capacity, and efficiency. The theories help nurses to care for themselves and their patients, interpret and address situations, and sustain nursing practice. Since nursing theories are ubiquitous, they also help standardize nursing practice, making it possible for nurses to operate anywhere in the world.

The Nursing Metaparadigm

A metaparadigm is a set of ideas that offer a structure for how healthcare discipline functions. Metaparadigms comprise concepts that address the primary issues in a discipline, which helps map out the parameter and focus of the domain in question. The metaparadigm of nursing comprises four main concepts tied to nursing theories: person, health, environment, and nursing. These 4 concepts form a foundation for nursing practice. They interrelate or interact to ensure nurses deliver holistic care. As such, nurses can view patients as holistic and independent persons. They also serve to address the health and environments of the patients and the responsibilities/duties of nurses. While person, health, and environment relate to the patients, the nursing concept centers on nurses. These concepts define the scope of the context and content of being a nurse. When applied to a nursing process, these concepts allow for a complete approach to patient care.

Person

the person in a nursing metaparadigm focuses on the multiple needs of those under the care of nurses. This includes the patients, their families, and their community. The nurses can look at the patient's emotional, social, and spiritual aspects and consider them as people with physical needs. With the holistic view, nurses can care for the patients by emphasizing the need for patients to express their emotions, seek spiritual support, and get social support from family and friends. The basis of this metaparadigm is that people can be empowered to manage their health when they have positive personal connections.

Health

The health concept relates to the patient's level of wellness when receiving care. It embodies the multiple factors that go into the patient's well-being, including the spiritual, emotional, social, physical, and intellectual components and how they can be integrated to ensure maximum health outcomes. It considers the quality of healthcare across the lifespan, as health deteriorates, and past health issues can influence different stages and present problems later. It extends beyond physical wellness and includes the patient's emotional, mental, spiritual, and social health. It also looks at the genetic composition. Nurses should consider all the factors to ensure that they select an efficient treatment plan for the patient. Health might have different meanings considering patients, clinical settings, and healthcare providers.

Environment

The concept of the environment relates to the surroundings that affect the patient and influence their health and wellness. The premise of this concept is that altering the environment can improve health. It includes the positive and negative conditions or situations that influence the patient and the physical environment that affects families, friends, and close companions.

Nursing

The nursing component of the metaparadigm addresses what the nurses do and what they know. It focuses on their character, skills, actions, and attributes on behalf of or in cooperation with the patient. Nursing can be defined in many ways depending on the nursing scholar. It focuses on providing safe, efficient, effective, timely, accessible, purposeful, and reasonable patient care for the best outcomes. When analyzing a nursing theory, you will realize that some will define some components of the nursing metaparadigm while leaving others irrelevant to the theory. Likewise, you will find some theories encompassing some concepts while others have them all.

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