Potter: Canadian Fundamentals of Nursing, 6th Edition

Chapter 05: Theoretical Foundations of Nursing Practice

Key Points – Printable

• The hallmark of nursing practice is its unique body of knowledge and the way nurses use it.
• Nursing science has evolved within a historical and social context.
• Nursing theory represents the attempts by nursing scholars to articulate ways in which
knowledge from multiple sources can be systematically applied in a wide variety of ways to
guide professional, accountable, and defensible nursing practice.
• Much of the early theorizing about nursing practice was specifically designed to guide
nursing curriculum development so that nursing education would be focused on the
knowledge unique to nursing care.
• The nursing process is the fundamental problem-solving process by which new situations are
assessed, plans are developed, and interventions are performed and evaluated.
• Nursing care requires the application of general knowledge to an infinite range of unique
situations. Nursing process and nursing theory represent strategies to guide the application
process.
• The major components of nursing theory, sometimes called the metaparadigm concepts, are
person, environment, health, and nursing.
• Nurses’ understanding of the role of science has changed as more complex forms of science
have been articulated by philosophers of science; science is no longer limited to simple
relationships such as cause and effect but instead provides strategies for understanding
increasingly complex relationships and phenomena.
• Nursing knowledge derives from, in addition to science, various sources that include
aesthetics, personal knowing, sociocultural understanding, and ethics.
• Nursing theorists based their conceptual frameworks on various ways of thinking about
human behaviour and experience. Some framed their ideas within theories of human
behaviour, such as needs, interaction, or systems, and others drew their primary inspiration
from what they observed in excellent nursing practice.
• Nursing conceptual frameworks include those for understanding both the person as the
nurse’s patient and the nurse’s role in relation to that patient.
• Although each framework may have been an attempt to organize nursing knowledge and
systematic reasoning processes in a different way, each was aiming for a very similar ideal of
excellent decision making in nursing practice.
• Although nursing theoretical frameworks are no longer considered useful as prescriptive
models for practice, they help conceptualize nursing’s interests and identify researchable
nursing problems.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Canada, a division of Reed Elsevier Canada, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Key Points 5-2

• As the practice of theorizing about nursing care evolves, the role of philosophy in helping
nurses understand their relationship to knowledge has become increasingly relevant.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Canada, a division of Reed Elsevier Canada, Ltd. All rights reserved.