Essay about The Evolution of Nursing Practice

Nursing care was unscientific and consisted of assisting patients with usual body functions; and was typically administered by women of a religious order or by women who by nature of their lifestyle frequented hospitals. Hospital care was for the poor and destitute; since home based medical care was better than risking additional infections in the dirty, crowded, and disease-ridden hospitals. During the typhus epidemic of 1852, hospital staff and patients suffered the greatest morbidity and mortality. (Ranade , 199817-19)

The nursing profession became a recognized vocational during the crusades (1100 to 1200). Criminals, widows, and orphans were recruited to take care of the sick in exchange for housing and food. Health care conditions became extremely bad. In the mid 1800s Florence Nightingale a woman who studied in Germany with a Protestant order of woman who cared for the sick lowered the death rate from 60% to 1%. She train a group of woman to care for the sick and wounded. She believed that cleaning up the environment and providing ventilation and sanitation and proper nutrition will decrease the death rate which she succeeded. Florence Nightingale kept records and statistics that reinforced her believes of care. Many

In modern society, religion and medical science both play vital roles in healing across the world. To become a nurse you must be licensed in order to practice. This ensures quality care to patients. Women are able to practice nursing and obtain education to advance their careers. The Renaissance started the advancement in science. Now, new advancements are made every year in the healthcare field.

During the time of Elizabeth Frye, Pastor Fleidner and Florence Nightingale is when a system of nursing was established. Medical professions found it difficult to train women on the basic skills of nursing, however it was only due to hard work that many obstacles were overcome as they recognized order and cleanliness in the hospitals and they discovered that due to the cleanliness, deaths declined and the amount of people recovering increased and nurses were regarded more like assistants to doctors rather than servants.

The historical development of nursing today is based upon the lives of many, their contributions, sacrifices and experiences. These things brought about renovations in patient care. Different ways of thinking led to research, theories and evidenced based practice. The importance of studying nursing history has led to overall progression of nursing as a profession. In order to fully study the historical development of nursing we need to study all aspects of nursing science throughout time, explain the relationships between nursing science and our profession, as well as influences of other disciplines on the

Nursing has been part of human society for a large and mostly undefined amount of years, with first records being in primitive societies. In such societies, the role of caregiver or nurse was often given to one at birth or shortly after birth. Not unlike today, most nurses were female, with these societies thinking that it has been the role of the females since they nurse and provide nurturance their infant. While a majority of them were female, males were also involved being medicine men and shamans. The treatments they supplied were often ineffective and irrelevant to the disease that the patient had.

The idea of nursing actually pre-dates the 19th century, but the first professional nurse is Florence Nightingale. Traditionally, only sick people with families could get the level of care needed, but Nightingale realized the mistake in that assumption. If one didn’t have a family they couldn’t get the correct level of care. During the Crimean War, Nightingale helped clean the soldier’s wounds, provide wholesome food, and generally keep the wounded tent clean. This drastically reduced the amount of casualties and thus the idea of professional nurses was born. A few years down the road, physicians gave nurses a more in-depth education

Nurses have gone through a significant evolution over time. Nurses work in many setting such as hospitals and homes. Some nurses are even stationed in foreign countries around the globe. In the past, they took care of revolutionary soldiers. “Where the brave soldiers went, the nurses followed,” (A history of care). In world war one and two they were put at risk for disease, and capture (A history of care). Over time nurses have had had to enter many disastrous scenes to aid in care. For example, Clara Maass died in 1901 for volunteering for experiments to control yellow fever (A history of care). Over time nurses have made many contributions to this world to make it a better place.

As former President Barack Obama said, “America’s nurses are the beating heart of our medical system” (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2010). Nursing as not always been the way it is now. To understand the history behind nursing, one must educate themselves on who Florence Nightingale was. Florence Nightingale had a major impact on the development of modern nursing. Before the introduction of modern nursing by Florence Nightingale, treatments were not giving the way that they are now. Treatments were done in the patient’s home rather than at a hospital or clinic. Patients were giving prescribe medicine and then was told to rest and given specific diets that they were to follow to see improvements in their health. Rather than treating the sickness itself, the medications that were prescribed focused on relieving the patients of their symptoms. As mentioned earlier, treatments were done in the patient’s home which made nursing a domestic. This all changed with Florence Nightingale, as she helped with guiding the status of nursing into a profession.

The nursing field has grown in so many way since the 1900s. A little background about the nursing field… Taking care of the sick was believed that it was caused by sin so nursing was looked at as a religious calling. Around this time, hospitals were built and nursing became recognized as vocational. Around the 1800s, Florence Nightingale changed the nursing field. She was the woman who founded the most important part in infection control, sanitation and sterilization. This lowered the death rate from 60% to 1%. This also opened the door for her to train and educate other women by opening up her first Nightingale training school. This built the foundation what the nursing field is about today.

Nursing began gaining attention as a profession during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when hospitals were built for the many pilgrims needing health care. In the sixteenth century, a shortage of nurses ensued when Westerners became more concerned with warfare and exploration instead of religious beliefs. Women prisoners were released to help care for the sick; they worked for low wages for long periods under stressful conditions. During the mid-nineteenth century, Nightingale introduced nursing that’s still being used today; she gave birth to the nursing profession.

However, many doctors still did not recieve a degree, and instead opted to immediately begin their said careers with a much more hands on methodology, in which they would immediately begin treating patients, with basically no prior medical knowledge, apart from what was learned through the hospital or medical facilities used at the time. During this time nurses also began to become far more mainstrem in the latter half of the 19th cenury. Nurses were looked upon in through the lense of a tradtional “caregiver” model, where during this time period was naturally ascribed to women. As training schools for nurses increased, their presence in hopsitals became as common place in western medicine as doctors themselves. The U.S. medical industry was undergoing a massive reform, with treatment for ailmens in a hospital setting becoming highly common, as the late 19th century turned into the 20th century. After during World War I the U.S. saw an large increase in health insurance as a policy, this developed especially during the 1920’s.

The folk image of nursing is one that is seen in movies or read about in books. This is the image of the medicine man or village healer. The knowledge in this type of nursing was handed down one generation at a time and primarily cared for the children and elderly of the social groups. The religious image of nursing is from a time when nuns or religious ambassadors took over the primary responsibilities of taking care of the poor, sick and elderly. Not too far a concept from this was the servant image of nursing which was marked by a time when the undesirables of society were charged with caring for the sick and elderly. During times of war, the need for nurses increased and

Nursing starts as far back as the late 1700s when a, New York Physician, Valentine Seaman, organized a course of lectures for nurses who cared for maternity patients. An early nineteenth century program, the Nurse Society of Philadelphia (also referred to as the Nurse Charity of Philadelphia) trained women in caring for mothers during childbirth and postpartum period. (Jean C. Whelan) The founder, Dr. Joseph Warrington, a strong advocate for women interesting in pursing nursing as an occupation, authored a book. (paraphrase) (Jean C. Whelan) If you look at Health care in the 1800s is not what is today. There were no generally accepted body of knowledge so that rival theories circulated competitively. The year 1873 was a defining moment year in American history. In that year, three nursing educational programs began operations. As the centuries past, our understanding of the field of Nursing began to evolve into a legitimate school of thought.

American Nurses Association defines nursing as “the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities, and population”( Potter,P.,& Perry, A. 2005,1-5). Thus making nursing dynamic and ever changing. However, when nursing