Nursing is a profession that rotates around (1) encouraging, upholding and reinstating health in people, (2) It as well necessitates the prevention of ailments and diseases and supporting individuals until they are competent enough to look after for themselves. Nursing practice can also be influenced by (3) the philosophical foundations of the profession, which is identified as a significant, factor in job satisfaction (International Council of Nurses, 2001).
Nursing is a profession that rotates around encouraging, upholding and reinstating health in people. Many people have the misconception that nursing only entails giving care. They overlook the fact that nursing also helps in providing scientific methods of reinstating health. Because of this factor of helping people, nursing is an important feature and should be taken with gravity it deserves. Nursing may be defined as an activity, an occupation, a profession, or as a discipline. Professional practitioners (the doctor, the nurse, the lawyer) use their knowledge to identify and understand the problems presented by the client and to identify ways of solving them (Warfield and Manley, 2003). The professional’s knowledge base includes some knowledge that is shared with other people, but also includes discipline-specific knowledge about the particular conditions or problems which constitute the discipline’s’ phenomena of concern’ and the particular interventions that can be used to overcome them. This is the profession’s particular domain their particular expertise, or what they know about (American Nurses Association, 2002). Professional practitioners also have both shared and discipline-specific skills. The core skill, which defines and distinguishes professional practice in any field, is the judgement that matches the knowledge base to the individual client’s need – the process that in health care is usually called clinical decision making or clinical judgement.
In many countries, the most common approach to defining nursing has been by defining nursing as ‘what nurses do’, expressed in terms of roles, functions, or tasks. This approach is, however, inadequate because what people ‘do’ is determined by circumstances and the boundaries change over time (Walsh). Many tasks now undertaken routinely by nurses were once the exclusive prerogative of doctors, and sophisticated technical procedures, which were once thought to require the skills of a registered nurse, are nowadays taught to patients or their informal careers. More emphasis has now been put on nursing due to this factor, where people have realized the necessity of nursing as a profession.
Conclusion
Nursing as a career has arrived at an exalted point in growth where the term nurse now is tantamount with the expression patient advocate, consequently providing the field an imperative image to accomplish. Nursing is profession and as such should be accorded much gravity. It is the largest profession in the health care industry. The political and social class should realize the fact that nursing does not encompass only care giving, but other scientific mechanism too.
Questions
1. Discuss historical and contemporary factors influencing the development of nursing.
2. Discuss the criteria of a profession and the professionalization of nursing..
References
American Nurses Association (2002) Nursing: A social policy statement. Kansas City: ANA.
International Council of Nurses (2002) The ICN definition of nursing.Geneva: ICN.
Walsh, K. C. "Social Class Identity and Political Understanding of Health Care Reform" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference, Palmer House Hotel, Hilton, Chicago, IL . 2011-03-12 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p266491_index.html
Warfield C and Manley K (2003) Developing a new philosophy in the NDU. Nursing Standard, 4:41, 27-30.
