The statement, “Theory must be a guide to practice, not an end in itself,” has significant meaning to me. Nursing theory-guided practice is very important in the clinical setting, but it should be driven by the unique patient condition. As a nurse, we have to take all aspects of the patient into consideration when implementing theory-guided practice. We cannot disregard any patient condition or considerations just to make a certain theory or metaparadigm fit into our nursing practice. Younas and Quennell identify the importance of using nursing theory-guided practice over traditional practice in an article that they published. They did an analysis of literature including over twenty-six articles that proved nursing theory-guided interventions to be the most effective (Younas & Quennell, 2019). I believe that nursing theory is extremely significant in our everyday nursing practice while still keeping individualities of the patient’s condition and illness in consideration.
In the discussion board post for the first week of this course, I identified my personal tenets of nursing to include being compassionate, honest, and caring. I also strived to provide nursing care that was holistic and be an advocate for all of my patients. After studying nursing theories and continuing my practice as a nurse, my tenets have slightly changed over the past few weeks. While being an advocate for my patients and providing holistic care for my patients is still some of my main priorities as a nurse, I have identified a few more priority actions to my nursing care. Another tenet that I have added to my personal philosophy of nursing includes providing safe, individualized, and educated care to my patients. I strive to be a lifelong learner as a nurse. My tenets have slowly changed due to the environment and department that I work in. I have been working under conditions where nurses are not put in the safest situations.
I have been working in situations where the nurses have not received the proper education for the positions that they have been put in. Personally, I strive to educated and provide safe, effective, and quality care to every patient that I take care of in my practice. In an article by Vaismoradi et al. (2020), the numerous personal aspects of nurses were determined to affect and influence how closely safety protocols were followed in regard to patient care. These personal aspects include the nurse’s knowledge, perceptions, and their attitude towards patient care (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). Overall, my patient care is influenced by all of the tenets that I have described in the beginning of this course and now. This course and the study of theories has only helped develop my nursing practice and philosophy to be even stronger.
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