NURSING & MEDICINE

Nursing & Medicine

Nursing & Medicine

Introduction

Nursing is concerned with health while medicine focuses on cure. There is a functional difference also in care and healing. The political distinction between nursing ethics and medical ethics is stronger yet. Still none of these alone distinguish the two approaches. Nurses need preparation for the reflective thinking of ethics with or without a difference between medicine and nursing.

A dean of a major nursing school recently said. "We're not interested in medical ethics; there is virtually nothing there that is pertinent to nursing. Nursing has its own issues, problems, and principles, and they're quite different from, and often opposed to, those of medicine(Thompson & Thompson, 1995). " She might well have gone on to point out that nursing also has its established codes of ethics and doesn't need a philosopher (especially one who has taught medical ethics), to tell it what is right and wrong, good and bad-but she kindly refrained from that step. Her comment set me to thinking about the proposition that there is a distinct body of problems, issues and principles for the profession.

It seems to me there might be three general arguments to be given in support of this claim, apart from a detailed, nitty-gritty examination of the many facets and dimensions of nursing practice.

Discussion

Nursing has made phenomenal achievement in the last century that has lead to the recognition of nursing as an academic discipline and a profession. A move towards theory-based practice has made contemporary nursing more meaningful and significant by shifting nursing's focus from vocation to an organised profession. The need for knowledge-base to guide professional nursing practice had been realised in the first half of the twentieth century and many theoretical works have been contributed by nurses ever since, first with the goal of making nursing a recognised profession and later with the goal of delivering care to patients as professionals.

A nursing theory is an expression that has arose from a philosophical perspective that explains some phenomena. Overall, it is used to describe the accumulation of knowledge that is used to support nursing practice. It incorporates experiments and research to define nursing and nursing practice; furthermore, it gives reason to the accepted principles that form the basis for practice, and goals and functions of nursing (Wesley, 1995). In essence, a nursing theory enables understanding of what, how, and why nurses continue to practice.

The argument from historical tradition might begin by pointing to Florence Nightingale's 1893 paper. Since then nursing has ascribed to the ideals of treating persons rather than diseases. Prevention is better than cure. Hospitalization has definite limits in its ability to promote "positive health." The history of nursing is a history of nurses' struggles to adhere to these ideals through fostering the patient's active role in treatment and prevention through educational movements, home health care and improved personal hygiene and food handling, and through working for improved hospital conditions to reflect better the psycho-social aspects of ...