Humanistic nursing

“ For the process of nursing to be truly humanistic it must bear out, that is, be a lived expression of, the nurse's recognition and valuing of nursing as an opportunity for the development of the human person. To this end, humanistic nursing process echoes existential themes related to a person's becoming through choice and intersubjectivity.
Existentially speaking, man is his choices. This does not mean that a man can be anything he chooses. Naturally, each individual is unique, having his own particular potentials and limitations. ”

“ Nurses who have considered this humanistic nursing approach in terms of their daily practice have felt at home in the ideas. The conceptualizations fit their personal nursing experience. If there is any strangeness in the approach, it is perhaps that it does not follow the contours of the clinical specialties to which we have grown so accustomed that they may be more ruts than roads. This is not to say that humanistic nursing is opposed to clinical specialization in nursing. In fact, clinical nursing, as it exists in any form, is its very heart and base. ”

“ TOWARD A RESPONSIBLE FREE RESEARCH NURSE IN THE HEALTH ARENA ANGULAR VIEW Research is an inherent component of humanistic nursing. What condition of humanness is necessary in the nurse for the actualization of nursing's research potential? This chapter will attempt to share some brooding and mulling on this problem.
Nurses practice within ever-moving, changing settings where formulated plans frequently and suddenly go awry. Unexpected patient needs arise. Powerful others make both reasonable and unreasonable demands. Depended on others fail us due to human frailty or lack of dependability. ”

“ The term "humanistic nursing" was selected thoughtfully to designate this theoretical pursuit to reaffirm and floodlight this responsible characteristic as fundamentally inherent to all artful-scientific nursing. Humanistic nursing embraces more than a benevolent technically competent subject-object one-way relationship guided by a nurse in behalf of another. ”

“ Since man becomes more through his choices and the aim of nursing is to help man toward well-being or more-being, the humanistic nursing effort is directed toward increasing the possibilities of making responsible choices. Such choice involves, in the first place, an openness to and an awareness of one's own situation. A choice is a response to possibility. ”

“ For the nurse to be humanistic it is necessary for her to live her human condition-in-her-nursing-world proudly with all its vulnerability and all its wonders. As man, the nurse can recall and reflect on her "I," on her past "I-Other" experiences, and she can come to know and accept more and more of herself, as she becomes more. In humanistically recalling and reflecting a nurse will understand and respond empathetically and sympathetically to both her own humanness and the other's. ”

“ When it is genuinely humanistic, nursing is an expression, a living out, of the nurse's authentic commitment. It is an existential engagement directed toward nurturing human potential. The humanistic nurse values nursing as a situation in which the necessary conditions for such human actualization exist and is open to the possibilities in the intimately shared nurse-patient here and now. ”

“ Humanistic nursing practice theory in asking for phenomenological descriptions of the nurse's lived-world of experiencing proposes authentic awareness with the self of what is existent in the situation prior to conceptualization for dispersal. Unless nurses appreciate and give recognition to the dynamic meaningful breadth, depth, and future influence of their worlds the actualization of the potential thrust of the nursing professional will never be or become. ”

“ Humanistic nursing, viewed as a lived dialogue, offers a frame of orientation that places the center of our universe at the nurse-patient inter subjective transaction. Insightful recognition of the lived nursing act as the point around which all our functions revolve, could require a Copernican revolution of orientation of some nurses. It does provide, for all nurses, a true sense of direction that can be actualized by each unique nurse through creative human dialogue. ”

“ Science and art are forms of human responses to the human situation. They are valued in genuine humanism. Thus, the humanistic nursing approach does not reject advances in nursing technology, but rather it tries to increase their value by viewing their use within the perspective of the development of human potential. ”

“ It views nursing as the ability to struggle with other man through peak experiences related to health and suffering in which the participants in the nursing situation are and become in accordance with their human potential. So, like Elie Wiesel, the novelist, who states in One Generation After that he writes to attest to events of human existence and to come to understand, humanistic nursing proposes that human forms of existence in nursing situations need attestation and that through describing, nurses will understand better and relate to man as man is. ”

“ We convey our ideas, are open to others' questions, struggle to clarify and really communicate, and question ourselves, and others. In the process of the humanistic nursing course, using this methodology, which is deliberate and, yet, natural and authentic for us, we and our professional nursing staff students have learned and become more human, more questioning, more clinical, and just, more.
We value our moreness. Appreciating and valuing the effects of our actualizing selves as human beings, we must attest to our existential modes of nurse being ”

“ It goes without saying that it would be humanly impossible for a nurse to be wholly present to numerous patients for eight hours a day. But any nurse who has experienced moments of genuine presence in the nurse-patient situation will attest to their reality and to the fact that it is these beautiful moments that give meaning to nursing. In terms of actual practice, then, it is more realistic to think of humanistic nursing as occurring in various degrees. It may be more useful, in fact, to consider humanistic nursing a goal worth striving for ”

“ This arena of interplay is complicated further by man's capacity for nondeterminedness, his ability for envisioning and considering a variety of alternatives and choosing selectively. Often these alternatives are experienced as contradictory and inconsistent. Humanistic nursing calls forth in the nurse the struggle of recognizing the complexity of men's relating in the nursing world as "just how man is" and his nature, his human condition, as searching, experiencing, and an unfolding becoming. ”

“ Humans are the only beings conscious of themselves. Nurses are human beings. As such we are capable of looking at our existence, choosing our values, giving our world meaning and of constantly transcending ourselves, or becoming more. If we value and prize our human nursing world and our human potential for consciousness and expression, we will actuate our potential and conceptualize our human nurse-world. ”

“ The description of nursing phenomena is as highly prized now as ever. In humanistic nursing, phenomenological and existential currents interrelate. Having an existential view of nursing as a living dialogue influences which phenomena one becomes aware of, experiences, values, studies, and describes. Reciprocally, as one discovers and struggles to describe and develop meaningful ways of describing nursing phenomena, the lived nursing dialogue itself will be continually perfected. ”

“ Can we actuate the importance of the knowledge of man that becomes part of us through our nursing worlds? It is hard to honor the significance of the everyday, the commonplace, the intimately known? It has been said that one could know of the whole universe if one could make every possible relationship starting from a piece of bread. Think of a "simple" or "routine" nursing situation. Think of its true complexity and how it can trigger puzzlement, wonderment, and thinking. As learning situations, nurses' situations are existentially priceless. ”

“ The person belongs in the place and the place belongs to the person. On the other hand, when a person finds himself in a new place he may feel the discomfort of not belonging. This is as true for the nurse in an unfamiliar setting as for the patient. Again in this regard, the lived nursing dialogue is enhanced by the nurse's awareness of not only her own experience of space but the patient's as well.
CONCLUSION This chapter explored the basic view of humanistic nursing as a phenomenon in which human persons meet in a nurturing, intersubjective transaction. ”

“ The humanistic nurse, therefore, is alert to opportunities for the patient to exercise his freedom of choice within the limits of safe and sound practice. She is constantly assessing his capabilities and needs and encourages his maximum participation in his own health care program. Through coexperiencing and supporting the process in the patient's experience from his point of view, the nurse nurtures his human potential for responsible choosing. Both patient and nurse become more through making responsible choices in the intersubjective, transactional nursing situation. ”

“ This quality of personal authenticity allows one's responsible chosen actions to be based in human knowledge rather than human defensiveness. Man is a knowing place. From education and living experience one assumes an initial innate force in human beingness that moves man to come to know his own and others' angular views of the world. Humanistic nursing is concerned with these angular views, these differences being viewed by nurses responsibly and as realities that are beyond the negative-positive, good-evil standard of judgement. ”

“ Our amazement persists over the participants' ability to concentratedly discuss abstract theory and concrete nursing practice for weekly day-long sessions over six-to nine-month periods. Presently requests to participate in the next humanistic nursing course are mounting from nurses both within and outside the Northport complex.
The course, the theory, and this book are the fruits of our individual and collaborative efforts. While sharing seminar responsibility for graduate students in 1960, we began to dialogically and -dialectically struggle with professional and /clinical nursing issues. ”

“ Nursing, then, as a human response, implies the valuing of some human potential beyond the narrow concept of health taken as absence of disease. Nursing's concern is not merely with a person's well-being but with his more-being, with helping him become more as humanly possible in his particular life situation.
Human Potential
Since nursing involves one human being helping another, the notion of humaneness has been associated traditionally with nursing. Nursing practice is criticized justifiably when it is not humane and is taken for granted or praised when it is. ”

“ To be a quality force within community a nurse must open her being to the endless innovative possibilities and unattempted choices available to her. {38} The ability to thus open one's self requires our exposing our biases, the shades through which we regard the world, to the sunlight. In nursing our shades often are closed categories, labels, diagnoses, trite superficial hackneyed expressions learned by us, taught to us as fact, taken in unexamined, and left unreexamined despite other changes in ourselves and our situations. ”

“ For example, in terms of man as incarnate, it is certainly not new for nurses to focus on man's bodily existence. Naturally, one of nursing's basic concerns always has been care of people's physical needs. To view nursing from the perspective of the human situation, however, is to see beyond physical care, {19} beyond the categorization of man as a biopsychosocial organism. The focus is on the person's unique being and becoming in his situation.
Every man is inserted into the common world of men and things through his own unique body. Through it he affects the world and the world affects him. ”

“ It can stimulate questions to the frenzy of immobilization. The human nurse's system can become overloaded. Such overloading reflects the humanness of the nurse; like all man she can envision possibilities beyond any human being's ability of fulfillment.
Nurses know there are events in their commonplace worlds that scream for human interpretation, understanding, and attestation. ”

“ They broaden a person's perspective of the human situation, of man in his world. For instance, depictions of suffering man or of other aspects of the human condition that are found in poetry, drama, or literature are far more descriptive and much closer to reality than those given in typical textbooks.
Current nursing practice reflects the educational preparation of nurses that is weighted heavily with scientific courses and the methodology of positivistic science. Arts and humanities are a necessary complement. Science aims at universals and the discovery of general laws ”

“ Nursing, though not generally the ruling force of this type of planning, certainly is involved in control measures analogous to Plato's. Nurses do influence who gets the hospital bed and who does not, who gets the specialized treatment and equipment, who is discharged and when, and what goes into the education and planning for post-hospital health care. Also, how do our biases influence our teaching regarding family? Innuendoes are frequent in the areas of birth control, abortion, and family size. So nurses can make a difference regarding community thought, purpose, and action. ”