RN-MSN – Chief Nursing Officer
Nursing is a blend of art and science that combines both critical thinking and practicality with the necessary characteristics of sensitivity, empathy, intuition, creativity, and adaptability to meet the needs of each patient.
Science is concerned with cause and effect of situations and philosophy is concerned with human life.
The scientific views include the natural sciences, human or social sciences, and practice or applied sciences.
The philosophical views include analytical, continental, chaos, and complexity sciences.
Perhaps the nursing philosophy also coincides with science.
Nursing is well known for both the science and philosophy aspects and the important roles they play, but are often viewed differently. The scientific views include the natural sciences, human or social sciences, and practice or applied sciences.
Natural sciences consist of a unique body of knowledge that can stand alone and assumes that reality is objective, instead of subjective. This type of science is consistent, accurate, and reliable.
Natural sciences give way to focusing on disease processes, rather than the person. The goal is for the disease to be diagnosed, treated, and for outcomes to be noted.
This science is valuable to nursing as nurses assist with the identification of a disease process and treatments.
Human or social sciences involve human subjects bringing their experiences and life events as the main source of knowledge. The scientist and the subject are one. Human interactions are an important aspect of this science.
This view of nursing is focused on the selfless devotion to patients rather than to professional standards and values.
The social sciences in nursing is a reciprocal commitment that the nurse reveals devotion towards the patient and the patient experiences the benefits.
Practice or applied sciences focus on applying knowledge in relation to meet a human need, and not just generating knowledge for the pure sake of knowledge.
These sciences involve originality and individuality. It uses scientific processes and knowledge as the means to achieve a practical or useful result. They are not based on reliability and consistency.
Nursing gathers knowledge from other disciplines and builds on these to examine a meaningful result that may benefit and improve the lives of patients.
An example of this science is examining healthcare disparities among the elderly or another specific group of individuals.
The philosophical views include analytical, continental, chaos, and complexity sciences.
Analytical philosophy involves the use of a systematic approach similar to the scientific process, in answering questions.
It is considered a concept-based style of analysis. It focuses on reliability, causality, prediction, proof, and assumptions.
This type of philosophy can play an important role in nursing in that the approach is based on what has been tested and proven, so it offers validity.
Continental philosophy is a more recent approach and involves understanding human experience and how history influences the meaning and interpretation of these encounters.
Instead of this approach focusing on problems, it is associated with humanism, connectivity, and lived experiences.
This type of philosophy plays a huge role in nursing due to the ethical and moral aspects involved.
First, it allows nurses to be able to recognize, reflect, and act on moral responsibilities. Second, it allows the patients to feel empowered due to the connectivity they experience.
The chaos theory seeks to understand how things change in a sudden, unexpected, or irregular way.
The complexity theory focuses on more complex systems that involve numerous parts, which often leads to unexpected order. The outcomes for both are not easily predictable.
Generally, the outcomes of chaos are associated with “good health” when the dynamics become stable. For instance, heart disease, epilepsy, and hyperlipidemia are not things that can manifest quickly such as a broken bone, or sudden injury but instead happen over a period.
The importance of these to the nursing philosophy is that in a chaotic system, there may be few interacting parts, such as one nurse who provides home health services and is able to produce great results on their own.
In a complex system, each nurse interacts with others, which leads to collective behaviors that feed back into each individual nurse as they administer care.
Both systems are important to nursing and provide the principles of ethics, autonomy, efficiency, and of quality care in various settings.
Both scientific and philosophical methods comprise the nursing philosophy and offer both advantageous and disadvantageous principles. It is important as a nurse to keep an open mind when dealing with both areas since one may be better suited for situation than the other.
A combination of these aspects is what truly makes nursing unique in all different areas, specialties, and disease treatment processes.
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