Using Florence Nightingale’s theory describe how her theory affects your attitude, your role as a nurse in caring for your patients, her impact on the nursing profession and the environment in an ICU unit. How Florence Nightingale’s theory affects Nurse’s Attitudes and Roles

Florence Nightingale’s theory affects Nurse’s Attitudes and Roles.

Florence Nightingale’s theory provides that nurses should use their brains, hearts, and hands to establish an environment of healing and provide holistic patient care that includes caring for the patient’s body, mind, and spirit (Riegel et al., 2021). The theory has been fundamental in building the holistic paradigm abiding by the humanistic approach to people in their inseparable relationships with their immediate environment.

Nightingale emphasizes the importance of environmental factors in health and well-being promotion or undermining. From my understanding of Nightingale’s theory, I, as a nurse, must develop and modify the immediate patient environment based on her canons of environment, including ventilation, cleanliness of walls and rooms, light, noise, personal cleanliness, bed and bedding, and taking food (Gallagher, 2020).

The theory creates the right attitude and perspective of caring for the whole patient by creating a healing environment. Per Nightingale’s theory, nurses should prioritize patient needs and create a better environment that facilitates healing.(Florence Nightingale’s Theory Essay)

Nightingale stresses the need for nurse education and training for their positions and requires them to adopt standards of care in all patient encounters. She played a critical role in advancing nursing education and changing the perspective and scope of nursing care by initiating nurse training programs. Her philosophy and principles are the basis for offering holistic care, restoring the patient to their usual health, and bringing the patient to recovery (Ali Pirani, 2019).

Nightingale also advanced the nursing profession through active advocacy of nursing and nurses and lobbying for improved working and environmental conditions and respect for caregivers and environmental factors. Her view and emphasis on environmental factors influenced the design of ICU units when she worked with injured soldiers, creating the early intensive care model (Wallace & Kahn, 2018). During this time, Nightingale observed the association between hospital mortality and hygiene, which encouraged her to lead significant organizational changes to enhance sanitary conditions, making handwashing, bathing, and other asepsis and infection control principles mandatory in ICUs. (Florence Nightingale’s Theory Essay)

References

Ali Pirani, S. S. (2019). Application of Nightingale’s theory in nursing practice. Annals of Nursing and Practice, 3(3), 1-3.

Gallagher A., FRCN (2020). Learning from Florence Nightingale: A slow ethics approach to nursing during the pandemic. Nursing inquiry, 27(3), e12369. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12369

Riegel, F., Crossetti, M. D. G. O., Martini, J. G., & Nes, A. A. G. (2021). Florence Nightingale’s theory and her contributions to holistic critical thinking in nursing. Revista brasileira de enfermagem, 74(2), e20200139. https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7167-2020-0139

Wallace, D. J., & Kahn, J. M. (2018). Florence Nightingale and the Conundrum of Counting ICU Beds. Critical care medicine, 43(11), 2517–2518. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0000000000001290