preview

The Person And The Nurse Essay

Better Essays

The Person and the Psychiatric Nurse As concepts, the person and the nurse can be complex, subjective, and dynamic. As challenging as it may be to define these concepts, it is crucial to any nursing practice. Defining the nurse, as a concept, provides nurses with a shared understanding of their role and their purpose. Defining the person creates an objective perception of the client to act as a starting point for all nursing care. For this purpose, many nursing theorists have devoted their time to developing unique definitions for these concepts. Despite the theories popularity or relevance, each has contributed to the contemporary understanding of both the person and the nurse by encouraging further consideration of these concepts. The sharing of their unique perspectives and ideas allowed later theorists to expand upon or constructively criticize the theories, further broadening our understanding of their definitions. In fact, the recently updated Conceptual Framework for Psychiatric Nursing at Douglas College (2016) appears to exemplify the way in which we utilize previously developed theories to create our own; the Douglas College Framework seems to incorporate major themes and ideas from various nursing theorists. For example, the framework describes the person as a composition of the same five variables as nursing theorist Betty Neuman (Potter, et al., 2014) and it recognizes nursing as helping the person reach their “optimal” (Douglas College Psychiatric Nursing,

Get Access