Personal Nursing Philosophy paper
Concept Synthesis Paper on Personal Nursing Philosophy
You are required to submit a scholarly paper in which you will identify, describe, research, and apply the concepts that underlie your personal philosophy for professional nursing practice.
This will help you identify your own values and beliefs about the established metaparadigms and metatheories of the discipline. It will also help you identify and articulate concepts relevant to your specific practice. This paper is intended to be an exercise in clarification and organization of your professional foundation. You are also required to provide a list of assumptions from personal nursing practice that illustrate the concepts and framework of your theory.
Your paper should follow a format that includes:
· Nursing Autobiography: A brief (1 page) discussion of your background in nursing.
· The Four Metaparadigms: Identification, discussion, and documentation from the literature of your perspective on the basic four metaparadigms/concepts of patient, nurse, health, and environment.
· Two Practice-Specific Concepts: Identification, discussion, and documentation from the literature of your perspective on at least two other concepts specific to your own practice.
· List of Propositions: A numbered list of at least five propositions or assumption statements that clearly connect the concepts described.
Each week, you will complete various segments of your Concept Synthesis Paper and submit it to the Submissions Area for facilitator feedback when necessary. Your paper should integrate these discrete elements and reflect your personal nursing philosophy.
Answer the following questions as you complete your various tasks related to this assignment.
1. How do I define and employ the four basic metaparadigms of nursing theory in my professional practice?
2. What are the major concepts I employ that are unique to my professional practice?
3. What philosophies and theories from the literature of nursing and other disciplines/domains are consistent with these concepts?
4. How are the concepts of transcultural nursing, the health promotion model, skill acquisition, role theory, and change theory specifically integrated into my philosophy and practice?
5. What research supports these theories and concepts?
6. How do I integrate role and change theory into my professional practice and how may these theories be applied to the organization in which I practice?
The paper is to be thoroughly researched and well documented, with relevant material from the nursing theorists presented incorporated into the paper. Use the current edition of the APA Manual throughout the paper. Sources should focus on references from nursing theory but may also include conceptual and theoretical material from other professional domains. The paper, excluding references or appendices, is to be limited to 6-8 pages. Writing should be succinct and well organized, as it is impossible for the facilitator to evaluate form and content separately.
Your philosophy/framework is to be given a title that is appropriate to its content and emphasis.
Additional directions
The nursing autobiography included personal experiences in the field of nursing.
Provided an account of the current professional role of the student.
Included factors that guided decision making.
Quality of Essay
Enlisted the four concepts of the nursing metaparadigm.
The essay included a definition of the four concepts of the nursing metaparadigm with reference to professional practice
The essay mentioned how the four concepts of the nursing metapardigm were employed in nursing practice.
The essay enlisted two practice-specific concepts.
The essay included a numbered list of at least 5 propositions or assumptions.
The assumptions illustrated the concepts in a manner, which further clarified the students’ use of the conceptual material.
The essay demonstrated consistency between concepts and assumptions.
The concepts were connected and integrated to reveal a meaningful sequence.
The essay demonstrated clarification and organization of the students’ professional foundation.
The essay demonstrated evidence of critical thinking in analysis and response.
The essay demonstrated understanding and integration of lecture material, reading assignments, and sources consulted.
The essay was well written, well organized, and articulate.
Presentation Criteria
The paper clearly demonstrated an understanding of theoretical principles (i.e., concept development, definitions, etc.)
The paper revealed clarity, organization, and articulation of ideas.
The paper showed that ideas were well documented.
The paper revealed the breadth of research effort.
Written responses are free of grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors. Citations and references are included and written in the correct APA Style. Paper length is limited to 6-8 pages.
Scholarly academic references
Week 1
The Theory Era
The theory era began with a strong emphasis on knowledge development. Although in the previous two decades proponents of nursing theory and nursing theorists had begun to publish their works, it is noteworthy that they denied being theorists when they were introduced as such at the 1978 Nurse Educator Conference in New York with the Nursing Theory theme. There was understanding among those attending the conference that the presenters were theorists, and by the second day, the audience responded to their denials with laughter. This seems strange today, but this was the first time most of the theorists even met each other. Their works had grown out of content organization in nursing education courses, nursing practice administration in large agencies, and structures for the thought and action of practice. It was clear that their works were nursing theoretical structures even before they recognized them as such. The theory era, coupled with the research and graduate education eras, led to understanding of the scientific process beyond production of a scientific product Theory forms the foundation of knowledge. Nursing theories form the foundation of nursing practice, research, and education. Throughout your professional life, you will be applying theory and the knowledge derived from theory in your practice environment regardless of the setting. An understanding of the nature of nursing knowledge from a historical perspective will help you relate better to where nursing theory development is today.
Theory
Theory is defined as “an organized, coherent, and systematic articulation of a set of statements related to significant questions in a discipline that are communicated in a meaningful whole; a symbolic depiction of aspects of reality that are discovered or invented for describing, explaining, predicting, or prescribing responses, events, situations, conditions, or relationships” (Meleis, 1997, pp. 8,12)1. Thus, a theory is a coherent set of propositions and statements that describe (factor-isolating), explain (factor-relating), and predict (situation-relating) phenomena as well as prescribe (situation-producing) actions toward goals. (Dickoff et al., 1968)2.
Theory development requires perceiving phenomena that are peculiar to nursing and proposing meaningful explanation for these perceptions. The nursing profession identifies four levels of theory—metatheory, grand theory, middle range theory, and practice theory. The theories are classified based on their levels of abstraction or complexity.
A complete structure includes a conceptual model, derived theories, and correlated empirical research methods. Each conceptual model and theory is comprised of concepts and propositions. The complete structure forms a hierarchy that is based on levels of abstraction.
Most abstract: the conceptual model that provides the context or frame of reference for theory-generating and theory-testing research
Intermediate level: the theory that is generated or tested
Most concrete: the empirical research methods used to collect and analyze the data
1Meleis, A. I. (1997). Theoretical nursing: development and progress (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.
2Dickoff, J., James, P., & Wiedenbach, E. (1968). Theory in a practice discipline Part 1: Practice oriented theory. Nursing Research, 17(5), 415–435.
Importance of Identification of theory
Early knowledge consisted of loosely connected clusters of concepts. Later knowledge developed interrelated statements connecting the concepts. Advanced theory provided a knowledge base for intervention strategies that clusters of concepts could not.
Identification of theory is important to understand the characteristics of theory structures. A complete theory of nursing identifies the three elements of context, content, and process; some theorists articulate each element better than others.
Context is the environment in which nursing acts occur; the context of a theory describes the nature of the world of nursing and may describe the nature of the patient’s world.
Content includes the subject matter of a theory; this comprises the stable components that are acted on or that do the acting
Process implies the action part of the theory, the intervention elements.
In addition to these elements, all theories should be examined for certain common factors:
Theories should be based on concepts and propositions
Theories should be specific to the nursing context
Theories can be applied to many situations
Theories should be relevant to potential users
Theories should be easy to define it in operational terms
Theories should correspond with empirical findings
Theories should demonstrate internal consistency.
Florence Nightingale made the first attempts at theory-based nursing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She organized a group of women to deliver care under her supervision and that of war surgeons. She established the need for hygiene, with environmental change as the means to enhance healing. For her, the nursing domain was the patient and the environment…
