Nursing Theory in Practice

Nursing Theory in Practice

Nursing Theory in Practice

Nurse practitioners encounter diverse patients and care settings that implore them to base their actions and decisions on nursing theories and worldviews. Patient care entails application of principles and evidence-based practice interventions to attain quality care outcomes (Alisher et al., 2017). The essence of this paper is to describe the importance of applying nursing theory in practice when providing care to patients. The paper also describes a nursing theory that best reflects my personal view of the essence of nursing and its effects on planning and provision of care to my patients.

Purpose of Applying Nursing Theory to Patient Care

Nursing is a distinct professional discipline shaped by its concepts and practices framed through nursing theory. Nursing theories are unique organized, knowledge-based models that essentially define the scope of nursing practice that includes what constitutes nursing, tasks that nurses undertake, and reasons for the tasks in place. Theories are essential to the nursing profession since they offer a foundational knowledge of care concepts that allows nurses to explain what they do for patients and reasons behind each and every action and course of treatment (Pokorny, 2018). The implication is that a nursing theory is essential to patient care as it allows nurses to articulate evidence to justify the approaches behind their practice.

The application of nursing theory to patient care demonstrates that nurses understand the effect of each action and every course of treatment intervention. Nursing theory assists patients to know different approaches to their conditions and how they can improve concepts like self-care and management (Alisher et al., 2017). For instance, Orem’s self-care theory is a nursing approach that implores patients to take control and not just to

wait for a disease or illness to dictate what they should do. Patients should take control by executing self-care activities like physical exercise, having balanced diet, seeking medical reviews, and attaining health knowledge about diseases and infections, and even monitoring body aspects like blood sugar levels.  The implication is that applying nursing theory to patient care provides benefits to patients, nurses, and the entire health system as it allows each stakeholder to take responsibility and necessary actions and interventions to improve health care at different levels.

Nursing Theory as Meaningful to Current Practice

Before the development of nursing theories, nursing was mainly a task oriented occupation where physicians trained nurses. However, through evolution of the profession, nursing theory serves today as the foundation of nursing training and practice. Nursing theory is an essential component of the healthcare delivery system because of various reasons. Firstly, nursing theory-guided practice assists in enhancing the quality of nursing care as it enables nurses to articulate what they can do for patient and the justification of their actions (Alisher et al., 2017). While more focus is now placed on traditional practice and application of evidence-based practice nursing, theory remains a significant part of attaining the foundation for nurses to apply the two aspects in their practice environment. In their integrative review, Younas and Quennell (2019) found that nursing theories guide the nursing practice while theory-guided practice is more useful than traditional nursing practice.

Thirdly, nursing theory assists nurses to comprehend their purpose, mission and their role in the healthcare system (Pokorny, 2018). For instance, the Nightingale’s environment theory shows that nurses are health care providers and should be considered as primary care providers (Alisher et al., 2017). Orem’s self-care theory shows that nurses are patient educators. Therefore, nursing theories shows that nurses can have different roles, right from care provider to educator, advocate and change agent. Fourthly, nursing theory guides patient care, research, practice and education as well as patient care as demonstrated. Therefore, nursing theory is a core aspect of current practice.

Application of Nursing Theory Before Planning and Care Provision

The use of nursing theory before planning and providing patient care is essential for care management based on its components. Nursing care plan comprises of five stages that include asse