Nursing Metaparadigm Significance to Philosophy of Nursing
Metaparadigm concepts have the key issues in disciplines. Over the past, builders of concept models and theory developers focused energy on developing coherent theories whose purpose was defining nursing and come up with a standard for its practice (Bender, 2018). This theorist aimed to clarify the complex intellectual domains that separate expert nursing and other care tasks. Thus they were developing devices that explain the nursing complexities. Fawcett articulated the four metaparadigm concepts that include person, health, environment, and nursing, which served as a framework in which concepts proceeded. Most of the models claimed their sources, and in others, they can be derived from relationships and language. Thus, nursing theories have been complicated due to extreme positions and polarization in the nursing approach to the main metaparadigm.
Conceptualization of the Person
Nursing theories are distinguishable by different ways whereby they conceptualize the nursing’s client. Although some have been extended to include family and community, most models in nursing have been the show of organizing data framework about the individuals as the sole focus for nursing attention (Bender, 2018). However, much of the disagreement amongst theorists is diverse views about how nursing should understand the individuals for the professional nursing mandate.
The Meaning of Embodiment
The human nature understanding is central to nursing theory and practice. From history, nurses practiced from the perspective of biomedical in which the main focus was the patient’s body in exclusion of the person as a whole (DeLaune et al., 2019 pg. 58). Disease descriptions focused on symptoms and physical signs, laboratory test values, and prescribed medicines. However, attempts to move this type of care occurred in the 1970s whereby nurses started to claim the patient in physical, social, psychological, and spiritual dimensions (DeLaune et al., 2019 pg. 59). The nurses’ and patients’ experiences were improved since there was part of bodily well-being being left out of nursing activities.
The Context of Illness
Traditionally, disease beliefs put the nursing focus on isolatable, quantifiable, reducible, and changeable processes. Nursing adopted a change in philosophical orientation of disease to illness (Bender, 2018). However, some theorists took relatively extreme positions, which put diseases within the field of energy, which is person, which challenged nursing to appreciate energy fields in the larger universe that is defined individually. Beyond the notion of diseases as an individual experience, the assumption on free will pose a risk of not meeting the patients’ population needs.
Conceptualization of Health
Health has been key in nursing interest since its beginning. In the recent time, nurses have explored the quality of life concepts as critical in the patient outcome (Sitzman, 2017). However, individuals’ health or quality has not been conceptualized clearly in nursing—theorists who are known for the totality paradigm view wholeness of human in psychological, spiritual, social dimensions. However, most theorists conceptualized health as a normal process or state with the belief that health is part of an individual’s life. Nevertheless, perceptions about health have evolved. Florence nightingale described health as a state of well-being and putting individuals’ powers (Sitzman, 2017). It can be argued that nursing in the past saw health as a state and self-actualization process. In the recent past, health conceptualization has been defined as a normative process of being inseparable from an individual’s lived experience.
Conceptualization of the Environment.
Nursing theories in the totality paradigm hold a limited environment conceptualization as the individual’s immediate circumstances or surroundings. They are focused on an individual’s adaptive capacity with no explanation of social, economic, and political forces (Lyckhage et al., 2018). Further, the simultaneity paradigms show the environment and the person as contagious that the person cannot be separated from the cosmos. However, one of the consequences of conceptualizing the environment is how the nursing mandate is interpreted. Conceptualization of the environment is necessary if nursing is to meet the societal and individual mandates. The multiple ways of seeing the environment allow for a unique understanding of daily life and account for economic and sociopolitical structures and ideologies.
Conceptualization of Nursing
In the past, nursing struggled to connect nursing practice with education, skill application of medical science (Lyckhage et al., 2018). The debates about professionalism surged in the 1970s showed self-conscious and disciplined efforts to imitate medical experts’ power to gain social credibility. Support groups sprung everywhere and beat the popular belief that professionals were the only ones who could guide in managing health (Sitzman, 2017). Therefore for nursing to regain client base, a philosophical reorientation was expected. Also, a debate about nursing care has escalated in recent. This has been fueled by the urge to define the unique contribution of nursing among other healthcare disciplines.
In conclusion, the metaparadigm motions have created more division in theoretical nursing than defining the nurses’ unique mission and effective communication. No matter the nursing practice mandate’s expansion, it will continually include the embodied ill person in need of nursing interventions. It is the job of nursing experts to challenge the profession’s theorists to define how their underway projects will contribute to epistemology’s holism.
