Self Reflective Analysis Paper

Self Reflective Analysis Paper

The nursing profession has long been seen as the 'paradigmatic profession' within sociological analysis. Studies such as that carried out by Mary Ann Elston have argued that one of the main reasons for the nursing profession's pre-eminence within health care systems lies in the fact that it has and remains 'a publicly mandated and state-backed monopolistic supplier of a valued service' (Elston, 1991: 58). The nursing profession had already enjoyed a high degree of clinical autonomy in the health care system as it existed before the founding of the NHS, but the establishment and development of this state-funded national health care system firmly established the position of doctors as 'gatekeepers' to the new health service (Alligood & Marriner-Tomey, 2006).

Nursing health care providers have a unique philosophical base and perspective, which forms the basis of their care. The first nursing theorist and founder of professional nursing was Florence Nightingale. During the mid-1800s, Nightingale felt a divine call to forgo her privileged life and serve humankind. After extensive travel and study of religious order nursing care facilities, she began the first professional school of nursing for lay-women in 1853 in London, England (Johnson & Webber, 2010).

Nightingale is most widely known for her prompt response to a call to lead a contingent of nurses to the Crimea, where England was ensconced in a battle. When the nurses arrived, they found that the battlefield was strewn with seriously ill and injured soldiers and the conditions were beyond filthy. Men were lying in crowded conditions, covered in lice, with human waste covering the floors. Nightingale led her nurses to restore the environment into a setting where a person could heal and where further disease would be prevented. It was Nightingale's observance of the patient-environment interaction and the importance of the environment in healing that form the basis of her theoretical framework. In fact, the patient-environment relationship continues to be a foundational theoretical pillar in nursing theory. In the most basic of terms, nursing is concerned with the lived experience of the human-environment interaction in relation to health.

Nursing has long been considered an appropriate vocation for young women and was promoted as a normal and natural extension of women's domestic role. The classic image of the nurse is a woman performing in a hospital, a clinic, or a community setting. Although caring is considered a fundamentally human quality, care work is typically undertaken by women and girls. Women are believed to be well suited to perform the instrumental, emotional, moral, and relational labor of nursing. Nursing literature has long debated whether nursing is an art, a science, or both (Marquis & Huston, 2009). That debate about nursing as practice or discipline reflects the longstanding tension about the valuation of nursing labor as subordinate to the biomedical structure in which the discipline of nursing operates.

The work of nurses is physically and emotionally demanding, oftentimes unrewarded, undervalued, or unrecognized, and has been associated with poor health, low levels of satisfaction, unhappiness, and ...