Nature of Nursing

Peer Response: Length: A minimum of 150 words per post, not including references Citations: At least one high-level scholarly reference in APA per post from within the last 5 years Peer Post: The purpose of nursing that is unique and not performed by any other profession is caring. Some concrete foundations and principles establish the nursing profession’s caring values in the Nightingale Pledge. The original Nightingale Pledge, written in 1893, ends with the statement: “devoted towards the welfare of those committed to my care” (Vera, 2017). A simple point is showing a strong commitment to nursing’s identity in providing caring. This commitment to caring establishes nursing as the only profession to focus on the patient first and others’ welfare before self. To show the nursing dedication of fulfilling the commitment to caring, nurses are in charge of developing care plans. Unlike other professions, nursing provides the direction of the nursing care plan that a patient or an individual receives. A plan of care describes and directs the actions that nursing staff execute on a particular patient. This functions as a systematic guide to holistic patient-centered care following assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation (Toney-Butler & Thayer, 2019). It helps as a communication method among nurses, patients, and other healthcare providers to achieve health care outcomes. It provides consistency to the quality of care and the basis for evaluating the excellence of caring. Virginia Henderson’s nursing need theory presents frameworks useful to the preparation and promotion of a care plan. It focuses on the importance of the patient’s independence, human needs, and how nurses can assist those needs, allowing the nurse’s creativity in planning care (Gonzalo, 2019). She presented the fourteen components to enable nurses to view and care for the patient holistically. She defined the elements of the metaparadigm of nursing in the individual with basic needs to maintain health. The environment supports health from fourteen components of human needs. Nursing is a nurse’s function to assist the individual through a care plan keeping the human condition. In summary, the care plan enables the nurse to gather information from scientific sources and use critical thinking and problem-solving skills in practice. Nurses base the formulation, execution, and evaluation of the care plan from theoretical frameworks of established nursing theories. Theory-based nursing care plans are useful tools to enable care evaluation and promote holistic caring. Caring is the unique purpose of nursing. References Gonzalo, A. (2019). Virginia Henderson: Nursing Need Theory. Retrieved from https://nurseslabs.com/virginia-hendersons-need-theory/ Toney-Butler, T., Thayer J. (2019). Nursing Process. StatPearls Publishing, Treasure Island, FL Vera, M. (2017). The Nightingale Pledge and Its Versions. Retrieved from https://nurseslabs.com/the-nightingale-pledge/