Henderson

Henderson’s Definition of Nursing

In 1996, Virginia Henderson’s definition of the unique function of nursing was a major stepping stone in the emergence of nursing as a discipline separate from medicine. Like Nightingale, Henderson describes nursing in relation to the client and the client’s environment. Unlike Nightingale, Henderson sees the nurse as concerned with both healthy and ill individuals, acknowledges that nurses interact with clients even when recovery may not be feasible, and mentions the teaching and advocacy roles of the nurse. Henderson (1966) conceptualizes the nurse’s role as assisting sick or healthy individuals to again independence in meeting 14 fundamental needs: 1. Breathing normally 2. Eating and drinking adequately 3. Eliminating body wastes 4. Moving and maintaining a desirable position 5. Sleeping and resting 6. Selecting suitable clothes 7. Maintaining body temperature within normal range by adjusting clothing and modifying the environment 8. Keeping the body clean and well groomed to protect the integuments 9. Avoiding dangers in the environment and avoiding injuring others 10. Communicating with others in expressing emotions, needs, fears, or opinions 11. Worshipping according to one’s faith 12. working in such a way that one feels a sense of accomplishment 13. Playing or participating in various forms of recreation 14. Learning, discovering, or satisfying the curiosity that leads to normal development and health, and using available health facilities

ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY Purpose -

To facilitate the bodies reparative process by manipulating environment. Provides nurses with a way to think about nursing with a frame of reference that focuses on the clients and the environment. To guide research and enhance the science by supporting existing knowledge and general new knowledge.

Criteria 1. Clarity -

It focuses on the premise that the nurse can manipulate the patient environment in order to promote the patient’s recovery and well being. Nightingale ideas about nursing have guided both theoretical thoughts and actual nursing practice throughout the history of modern nursing. The client’s environment is manipulated to include appropriate noise, nutrition, hygiene, light, comfort, socialization, and hope. The principal were visionary and encompassed the areas of the practice, research and education. Most important, the concept and principles shaped and delineated nursing practice.

2. Simplicity -

Environmental theory offer the greatest sense of understanding because it provides basic concepts and propositions that could be supported and use for practice in nursing. It describes nursing as both art and science, the art in the practice, the interaction between nurse and client. Whereas the science speaks to the empirical or scientific, knowledge of nursing that explain every intervention done by a nurse.

3. Generativity -

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Stressed the importance of general concepts about ventilation and warmth, light, cleanliness, health of houses, maintaining and free –timeless environment and attending to the client’s diet and in terms of assessing intended timeless of food and it’s effect from the patient that assist in putting the patient in the best possible condition so that affect a cure. In Nightingale’s view, the person was a passive recipient of care, and nursing primary focus was on the manipulation of the person’s environment to maintain or achieve a state of health.

4. Empirical precision -

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Environmental theory is an act of utilizing the environment of the patient to assist him in his recovery that involves the nurse’s initiative to configure environmental setting appropriate for the gradual restoration of the patient health, and that external factors associated with the patient’s surrounding affect life on biological and physiological processes. Provide the nursing profession with the philosophical basis from which other theories have emerged and developed, and the ideas about nursing have guided both theoretical thought and actual nursing practice throughout the history of modern nursing.

5. Derivable consequences - Environmental theory were put in use, hospitals become a place for people to recover rather than a place to die. Nurses applied Nightingale’s principles in the community to the development of public health nursing. - Through manipulating the environment, nursing aims to discover laws of nature that would assist in putting the patient in the best possible condition. - The general concept of ventilation, cleanliness, quiet, warmth, and diet remain integral parts of nursing and health care today.