Florence Nightingale and her Philosophy of Nursing Term Paper

Florence Nightingale and her Philosophy of Nursing - Term Paper Example The reason she observed was absence of sanitation, lack of food and warmth for the wounded soldiers. After enduring with these circumstances she formed a theory which was successful and is practiced and followed by many. The main focus of her theory was on the environment and the patient’s reaction to it. Her belief was, if alternation in the surroundings are made nature helps patient to heal. The foundation of her theory depended upon environment, patient, health and nursing. NURSING THEORIES: A general view Theories are composed of concepts, definitions, models, propositions and sometimes even assumptions derived from nursing models, to acquire the knowledge regarding patient’s health and betterment. Nursing theories aims to identify and predict the phenomena of nursing. The theories of nursing assist the nurses to describe, explain and predict everyday experiences as well guide to review interventions and evaluation of the nursing care system. FLORENCE AND HER THEORY OF NURSING Florence Nightingale’s theories were basically regarding the ideal nursing requirements and one of the essential requirement was of course the â€Å"home sister† and after that practice of the skills required by the profession, for this purpose she wrote two articles, â€Å"Nursing the sick† and â€Å"Nursing, training of†, her aim was to combine the training from the wards and supervise learners abilities and moral development. The home sister’s duty in fact is to train the nurses, however Florence herself, was the nurse trained without the Home sister. â€Å"Observation tells how the patient is; reflection tells what is to be done; training tells how it is to be done. Training and experience are, of course, necessary to teach us, too, how to observe, what to observe; how to think, what to think† (Nightingale, 1882). She explained her environmental theory in her book â€Å"What it is and what it is not† According to Florence process of learning should carry on from the initial formal training and it should never be discontinued because nursing requires a solid educational base. It is however, quite surprising that Florence fought against the idea of requirement of license for the nursing professionals as it would undeniably affect their training and will be a cause of self-importance for the nurses where as actually this profession wants a feature of kind heartedness and down towards earth temperament. Profession of nursing should be considered as a higher calling other then just a profession, was Florence’s vie w, and that can just be secured when a nurse recognizes her responsibilities for the well being of the patient because nursing is