Critical Analysis of Contemporary Nursing Practice

Critical Analysis of Contemporary Nursing Practice

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the case study of a patient and describe the nursing theories and the care practice of nurses in order to deal with this patient.

Case Summary

The case is about a 67 year old man who had been admitted in hospital for the psycho-geriatric assessment. The old man has been suffering from various diseases. The main was acting in a violent way, and was showing anger because of the dependence and loss of power. The patient was an intelligent and independent man. This is the reason why he is unable to bear his dependence. As he got admitted in the hospital he started creating fuss for the staff, and the main reason of the conflict was the coffee pot. Therefore, once he escaped from the hospital and bought the coffee pot for himself and brought it in the hospital. He loved to serve coffee to hospital people. He always felt glad to serve coffee to the other people. He was estranged from his family; therefore, coffee was one of the reason through which his family met him. Thus, this paper makes discussion on the nursing care and care practices for this patient.

Discussion

There is no universally accepted definition for caring in nursing, but it can be described from four perspectives (Benner, 1989). The first is the sense of caring, which is probably the most common perspective for students to appreciate. This perspective emphasizes compassion, or being concerned about another person. This type of caring may or may not require knowledge and expertise, but in nursing, effective caring requires knowledge and expertise. The second perspective is doing for other people what they cannot do for themselves. Nurses do this all the time, and it requires knowledge and expertise to be effective. The third perspective is to care for the medical problem, and this, too, requires knowledge of the problem, interventions, and so on, as well as expertise to provide the care. Providing wound care or administering medications is an example of this type of caring. The last perspective is “competence in carrying out all the required procedures, personal and technical, with true concern for providing the proper care at the proper time in the proper way”. Not all four types of caring must be used at one time to be described as caring. Caring practices have been identified by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses in the organization's synergy model for patient care (2011) as “nursing activities that create a compassionate, supportive, and therapeutic environment for patients and staff, with the aim of promoting comfort and healing and preventing unnecessary suffering.”

Nursing theories often have a focus on caring. Theories are discussed later in this chapter. One in particular is known for its focus on caring— Watson's theory on caring. (Wilkes, 1995) defined nursing “as the science of caring, in which caring is described as transpersonal attempts to protect, enhance, and preserve ...