The Four Elements of the Nursing Metaparadigm
Lori A. Brown
Saint Joseph’s College
The Four Elements of the Nursing Metaparadigm
Florence Nightingale is recognized as the first nurse theorist. She described nursing as both an art and a science. She recommended adjusting the environment to improve the person’s health. I believe many of Florence nightingale’s philosophy ideas in nursing are still a big part of nursing at present time. While reading Notes on Nursing I found myself reflecting on many points of the metparadigm of nursing and comparing how it has not change much since Florence Nightingale’s ideas in each of the concepts of nursing. There are four essential concepts: person, health, environment and nursing. Depending on the specific needs of the patient, as nurses we must prioritize these concepts and provide care in a way that best suits the situation.
The first concept is person or the client, the person that most people see as the one lying sick in the hospital bed. However after being in the nursing field for several years now I know that it goes beyond the person in the bed it also includes the family, community, and population. They could be the individual who needs nursing assistance, families that need referral or coping skills due to disruption in function, communities who need health promotion or a larger population experiencing the aftermath of a natural disaster. Each of these participants (persons) has specific nursing need which nursing provides or advocates for them to facilitate optimal health. Working on a busy medical surgical floor I recently had the dilemma of having to help one patient who is only 56 years old deal with a difficult diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and having gone through a failed Whipple procedure. He was very emotional on this particular night. I was also trying to help a family member in another room deal with the emotional dilemma he was going through while watching his older brother of...