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Professional Presence Essay

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Professional Presence and Influence Professional presence is something of a nebulous concept. Before this course, I honestly never considered what it was and how my nursing practice was defined by it. During my journey through this course I discovered what it truly meant. “Presence is an intersubjective encounter between a nurse and a patient in which the nurse encounters the patient as a unique human being in a unique situation and chooses to spend her/himself on the patient’s behalf’’ (Wingate, 2007). Presence defines how a person interacts with those around them, and particularly in the healthcare field, it’s incredibly important.
A1. Two models of health and healing
In the history of modern medicine, practitioners have evolved …show more content…

As a result, physicians and nurses alike, may have failed to treat the whole person that was ill. They very likely only treated part of a disease or illness.
Another model of health that evolved over time is the physical-mind model. This model purports that a person’s overall state of health or ability to heal can be affected on how or what they think. For instance, that depression or anxiety can negatively impact a critically ill patient’s ability to heal. It also recognized that feelings or emotions can physically manifest as illness. For example, someone who is extremely anxious can give themselves an ulcer, without doing something to physically harm themselves. Simply being under significant stress can cause a physiological response to stimulate the creation of more stomach acid and wears a hole in the lining of the stomach, creating an ulcer. When using this model of health, doctor and nurses can treat a person, mind and body, when they have an illness.
Recently there was a patient on my unit that perfectly demonstrated this. Ms. B came in for an aortic valve repair. Her surgery went well, but shortly afterwards stopped participating in her care. She became apathetic towards physical therapy, to getting out of bed, and even so far as eating meals. When this happened, she started to physically decline and started getting complications. She got pneumonia, ended up on a ventilator and in the critical care unit 3 times in one month. She eventually

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