DNP 815 Reflective Analysis Case Report Paper

Health care delivery is a highly engaging practice founded on professionalism, ethics, and the determination to restore people’s health. Health care professionals should always maintain a healthy relationship with patients to achieve the desired health outcomes. As primary care providers, nurses meet patients with varying needs in everyday practice. They diagnose, treat, and advise them according to their needs. Generally, health outcomes depend on how nurses perceive patient care, individual values, experiences, and beliefs. These elements constitute nurses’ worldview and affect how they relate with patients and colleagues. The purpose of this paper is to describe my philosophy of nursing. Focus areas include the critical elements that determine health outcomes, including my central belief, worldview, view of health and illness, and the existence of nursing.

Central Belief about the Individual Person

The individual person is a constituent of interdependent parts. The whole person works as a system where each component influences the functionality of the other and the entire system. All parts must be fully functional for the entire person to function optimally. Nurses must also view patients as needy people, vulnerable to many health issues, and who require instant help. Their needs should be explored multi-dimensionally and assisted in the best possible ways to restore and maintain health. Individuals also differ in cultures, attitudes, and beliefs. Such factors influence their health statuses and response to current medical practices.

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How Personal Worldview Influences Approach to Patients

Patients’ culture and values affect how they perceive health and health care. As a result, nurses should be culturally competent and sensitive and ensure that cultural factors that affect health and healing are understood and integrated into the care plan. Kaihlanen et al. (2019) described culturally competent care as care that respects patients’ diverse cultural and social needs. Cultural competence is the foundation of patient-centered practice since it ensures that the multiple factors affecting patients’ health are considered before recommending any treatment plan. The care process is also designed to address the patient’s specific needs.

Viewing the individual person as a constituent of parts promotes systems thinking in health care delivery. When nurses embrace systems thinking, they perceive health as a combination of many elements that must be functional independently to ensure that the entire patient’s body functions as required. Holistic care thrives when health care providers embrace systems thinking. During diagnosis, nurses ensure that the physical, mental, and emotional health dimensions are evaluated since each affects how the entire body functions. Holistic care leads to high patient satisfaction and a healthy relationship between patients and health care providers.

The Environment and Individual-Environment Interaction

Patients can receive care in health care facilities or at home. Each place has different elements that constitute the care environment. Such an environment comprises the built environment and other factors influencing health such as people, comfort, and resources. The environment is the place and conditions affecting the patient’s health. It is among the conditions fundamental to healing in Florence Nightingale’s environmental theory (Gilbert, 2020). At home, factors such as clean water, air, and sanitation are part of the patient’s immediate environment. Nurses should examine the quality of the environment when developing treatment plans to ensure that patient care is patient-centered and addresses patient needs comprehensively.

Individuals and the environment have a mutual relationship. Each depends on the other, and the influence is profound. The person-environment interaction denotes a person’s physical and mental capacities and the demands they place on the social and physical environment (Jamshidi et al., 2020). People must protect the environment for it to be in pristine condition. On the other hand, human health depends on the air and water quality and food sources in their immediate environment. Besides dependence, adaptation and modification are further examples of individual-environment interaction. People modify and adapt to the environment to fulfill individual needs.

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Health and Illness

Human beings always look forward to living a full life. Achieving this goal requires keeping their health at the desired optimal level. Health implies a person’s physical, mental, and emotional status. Social well-being is a crucial health element since it affects a person’s spiritual and psychological functioning. A healthy person is free from diseases, but their absence does not necessarily imply being healthy. To be considered healthy, a person must be fully functional in all health dimensions. Illnesses relate to health since they ruin health. They adversely affect a person’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being (Bolton & Gillett, 2019). For instance, chronic diseases bring pain, anxiety, fatigue, and other symptoms limiting how a person functions. When tired or in pain, people cannot engage in activities that optimize health like exercises, playing games, and social interaction. Vulnerability to other diseases increases when people become ill.

Nursing Leaders Serving Others

Human flourishing can be viewed as a state where all the aspects of health are fully functional. Nursing leaders can serve others to promote human flourishing by serving as change agents in health care delivery and playing an active role in policymaking. Nursing leaders should guide positive change through evidence-based practice (EBP) as change agents. EBP improves outcomes by ensuring that safety and care quality is up to the desired standards (Hashish et al., 2020). Policymaking involves developing regulations that protect people from diseases and vulnerabilities. Suitable policies include laws that control the sale of junk food, prevent environmental pollution, and increase access to health.

Central Reason for Existence of Nursing

Nursing attracts millions of professionals worldwide. Since it is impossible to live without illnesses and injuries, nursing exists to help people and families overcome the challenge of diseases and injuries. Nurses also help people avoid diseases, live with them, and reduce pain when dying. In agreement with Garmy and Forsberg (2020), nursing is more than caring for people. It is also instrumental in promoting public health and ensuring that people and communities are productive. For instance, nurses help people avoid risky health habits such as sedentary lifestyles to avoid lifestyle diseases through health education. As a result, nursing exists to reduce the gap between the present and desired health state while empowering people to live the longest possible.

Conclusion

Nurses undergo intensive training to enable them to serve patients humanely, professionally, and excellently. However, nurses’ philosophies profoundly affect health outcomes, patient-provider relationships, and interprofessional collaboration. Their understanding of care, attitudes, values, and beliefs affect how nurses interact with others and relate to patients. As described in this paper, I believe that the individual person is a constituent of interdependent parts. As a result, systems thinking, patient-centeredness, and holism should dominate health care delivery to ensure that patient’s needs are addressed comprehensively.

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References

Bolton, D., & Gillett, G. (2019). The biopsychosocial model of health and disease: New philosophical and scientific developments. Springer Nature.

Garmy, P., & Forsberg, A. (2020). The career core of successful scientific leaders in nursing – their motivators and strategies. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 12, 49–57. https://doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S255093

Gilbert, H. A. (2020). Florence Nightingale’s Environmental Theory and its influence on contemporary infection control. Collegian, 27(6), 626-633. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.colegn.2020.09.006

Hashish, A., Aly, E., & Alsayed, S. (2020). Evidence-based practice and its relationship to quality improvement: A cross-sectional study among‎ Egyptian nurses. The Open Nursing Journal, 14(1), 254-262. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1874434602014010254

Jamshidi, S., Parker, J. S., & Hashemi, S. (2020). The effects of environmental factors on the patient outcomes in hospital environments: A review of literature. Frontiers of Architectural Research, 9(2), 249-263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2019.10.001

Kaihlanen, A. M., Hietapakka, L., & Heponiemi, T. (2019). Increasing cultural awareness: Qualitative study of nurses’ perceptions about cultural competence training. BMC Nursing, 18(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-019-0363-x