Foundations of Professional Nursing

This book presents a conceptual framework for contemporary nursing practice based on the science of self-care and also incorporates other nursing and multidisciplinary perspectives. It illustrates how to attain and integrate knowledge from nursing theory and theories of related disciplines to achieve optimal evidence-based nursing practice. Case examples from a variety of clinical situations integrated with nursing theory demonstrate the variables needed to achieve optimal nursing practice. The first chapter discusses, inter alia, the relative value of different ways and patterns of knowing within the discipline of nursing. This is followed by a chapter that explains the importance of knowing and understanding the proper object of nursing. Nursing is an action system; action systems begin with problem identification, framing, and delineation. Several factors condition or influence the requirements for self-care, and represent a point of articulation of nursing sciences with other sciences that inform health-related situations. Self-care agency is developed as one learns from his or her family members and others in society to care for self. A traditional collaborative-care system is a unique whole that is formed through the informal or formal negotiation for care by two adults. The dependent-care agent is a person in a relationship not only with the care recipient but also with other members of the family. The family may be a factor that conditions the therapeutic self-care demand and self-care agency of the family member who is the identified patient.