Nursing

“ The nurse who is able to go into a home quietly and unobtrusively and accept what she finds, even carpets and draperies, and still do clean work, is doing better nursing than the one who arranges a faultless room but upsets her patient and disrupts the household in the process. ”

“ It is hard for you children of to-day to imagine what nursing was in the early part of the nineteenth century. To you a nurse means a trim, alert, cheerful person in spotless raiment, who knows just what to do when you are ill, and does it in the pleasantest possible manner ”

“ And it is in the nursing situation that the nurse attends to calls for caring, creating caring responses that nurture personhood. It is within the nursing situation that the nurse comes to know nursing, in the fullness of aesthetic knowing. ”

“ No thoughtful man who has watched her in the character of nurse, even when she is uneducated, will entertain a doubt about her happy qualifications for the management of the sick.
The most important responsibilities of a physician have reference to ventilation, cleanliness, bathing, feeding,—in brief, to nursing; and no one but a stupid, obstinate man would suggest her inferiority for such services.
I have no doubt that, finally, the medical profession will fall almost exclusively into the hands of women, as its most important part, nursing, already has. ”

“ We felt that the nursing of the sick in their homes should be undertaken seriously and adequately; that instruction should be incidental and not the primary consideration; that the etiquette, so far as doctor and patient were concerned, should be analogous to the established system of private nursing; that the nurse should be as ready to respond to calls from the people themselves as to calls from physicians; that she should accept calls from all physicians, and with no more red-tape or formality than if she were to remain with one patient continuously. ”

“ THE PHENOMENON OF NURSING The phenomenon of nursing appears in many forms in the real lived world. It varies with the age of the patient, the pathology or disability, the kind and degree of help needed, the duration of the need for help, the patient's location and his potential for obtaining and using help, and the nurse's perception of the need and her capacities for responding to it. Nursing varies also in relation to the sociocultural context in which it occurs. Being one element in an evolving complex system of health care, nursing is continuously appearing in new specialized forms. ”

“ A recognition of these rather intangible facts is of consequence to the nurse, as it deepens her appreciation of the necessity for nursing her patient as a complete entity, mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. We are insistently reminded at every turn that no one part of the patient, no one aspect of her condition can be separately considered and the remainder overlooked. ”

“ Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized as the knowledge which every one ought to have — distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have. ”

“ For there the material exists, and will be used for nursing, whether the real "conclusion of the matter" be to nurse or to poison the sick. A man, who stands perhaps at the head of our medical profession, once said to me, I send a nurse into a private family to nurse the sick, but I know that it is only to do them harm. ”

“ Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal child in a home. ”

“ The patient and family gained the important value of confidence through the caring of the home health nurse; with the nurse's commitment to caring, they gained faith in themselves, their ability to deal with new health-related situations as they arose, faith that they wouldn't be left alone, faith that they were known as persons valuable in their own right and worthy of care. This is the value of nursing, the reason nursing exists as a distinguishable social and human service. ”

“ But nursing, as a handicraft, has not been treated of here for three reasons: 1. that these notes do not pretend to be a manual for nursing, any more than for cooking for the sick; 2. that the writer, who has herself seen more of what may be called surgical nursing, i.e., practical manual nursing, than, perhaps, any one in Europe, [Pg 72] honestly believes that it is impossible to learn it from any book, and that it can only be thoroughly learnt in the wards of a hospital ”

“ II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick. ”

“ Here is no light task nor mean privilege which is set before the nurse and in order to meet them fitly she must be prepared. The indispensable requisites for nursing and teaching the maternity patient, whether at home or in a hospital, are training, an exacting conscience, and genuine concern for her patient as an individual. ”

“ Chapter 1 presents a discussion of key ideas that ground and contextualize nursing as caring. The most fundamental idea is that of person as caring with nursing conceptualized as a discipline. Our understanding of this foundation has been seasoned both from within nursing and from outside the discipline, but always with the purpose of deepening our understanding of nursing. When we have gone outside the discipline to extend possibilities for understanding, we have made an effort to go beyond application, to think through the nursing relevance of ideas that seemed, on the surface, to be useful. ”

“ Acknowledgement of caring as the core of nursing implies that any nurse practicing nursing thoughtfully is creating and living nursing situations because, whether explicit or tacit, the caring intent of nursing is present. ”

“ The Value of Nursing.—In the great war hundreds and hundreds of women have gone to act as nurses in the hospitals, for the wounded and have done splendid work [197] They will no doubt be thankful all their lives that while they were yet girls they learnt how to nurse and how to do hospital work, so that they were useful when the call came for them. ”

“ HUMANISTIC NURSING: ITS MEANING Nursing is an experience lived between human beings. Each nursing situation reciprocally evokes and affects the expression and manifestations of these human beings' capacity for and condition of existence. In a nurse this implies a responsibility for the condition of herself or being. ”

“ Do not attempt a full nursing visit unless the patient meets you more than half way. Every patient is to be encouraged to come to the Center for as much of the nursing care as is possible for that individual woman. In the care of all patients it is the nurse’s responsibility to make every effort to solve (by working 424with every existing agency) such home problems as might effect the health of the mother or baby or disturb the mother’s peace of mind. ”

“ We are far from supposing that every woman is fitted to undertake it. Even a kindly heart and disposition alone are not sufficient, indispensable as they may be to the character of a nurse. The Notes on Nursing, lately published by one who has had a larger and more extensive experience of the subject on which she writes than any other woman, tells us what these trials and difficulties of the life are, as well as the various qualifications which are essential to the nurse's character. ”

“ Nursing is a professional service offered in social contexts, most often in bureaucratically organized health services. Discussions of health services, overheard in boardrooms and legislative chambers, are languaged in impersonal, aggregate, disembodying, and perhaps more importantly, economic terms. In contrast to the accepted ritualization of such language, nursing has a very important role to play—to bring the human, the personal dimension to health policy planning, and health care delivery systems. ”

“ In England and in some parts of America district nursing, or nursing among the very poor of certain sections of a city, is an established part of a nurse's work. Her duties are to go from house to house among the sick, to administer medicine and food, and to make the surroundings of her patient comfortable.
There is no way in which one may reach the hearts and sympathies of the poor so quickly as by helping them to, or showing them how to do for themselves, those things which they think they need. ”

“ There are many ladies, especially among the younger ones, who have acquired a considerable knowledge of nursing, and who might do invaluable service by imparting to intending emigrants some acquaintance with, at all events, such rudiments of nursing as are comprised in changing sheets, improvised cradles, bed rests, and the hundred and one little dodges—if they may be so termed—which make the whole difference in illness, and which so many people are utterly ignorant of. ”

“ Upon the trained nurse the modern practice of medicine makes great and ever-increasing demands: a nurse must perform complicated duties, meet critical situations, and carry out a wide variety of measures based on scientific principles which she must understand. Good will and sympathy are no longer enough; amateur nursing, even when performed with the best intentions, may involve grave dangers for those who are seriously ill. ”

“ It may be conceded that a nurse, possessing a preliminary graded school education, who has been carefully taught for two or three years in an accredited hospital, is able to give nursing care, under medical supervision, to the sick bed patient. ”

“ Out of necessity nursing, as a profession, reflects the qualities of the culture in which it exists. In our culture for the past quarter of a century nursing has been assailed with rapid economic, technological, shortage- abundance, changing scenes' vicissitudes. In the individual nurse these arouse turmoil and uncertainty. ”

“ If nursing practice is viewed as the implementation of scientific facts and what they call forth in the nursing situation related to man's condition of existence, is a heuristic science of nursing developed from this situation, by nurses, an appropriate practical professional aim? ”

“ Now well-appointed hospital trains move backwards and forwards from the clearing hospitals to the base. For the first time we enter the nurse's sphere. Everything changes when the nurse appears upon the scene. She loves order. Cleanliness is her life. She is trained in all the little arts of nursing which bring comfort and peace. She can do what no man can do. The doctor is splendid at his own special work, the stretcher-bearer, the ambulance man, and the hospital orderly at his. ”

“ Activity to develop and use nursing knowledge has its ethical ground in the idea of the covenantal relationship as expressed in the specific focus of the profession. Fundamental values inherent in the discipline and profession of nursing derive from an understanding of the focus of nursing.
The conception of nursing that we have used in this book views nursing science as a form of human science. Nursing as caring focuses on the knowledge needed to understand the fullness of what it means to be human and on the methods to verify this knowledge. ”

“ Until then, nurses were taken from the same class of women as ordinary domestic servants. Few realized that nursing was an art to be learned, requiring intelligence, knowledge, and skill, as well as sympathy and love. ”

“ A certain amount of scientific knowledge is necessary, in this as in any other field, to give the nurse an intelligent background and a kind of definiteness and stability to her work. She should be trained in the essentials of general nursing, of surgical nursing and operating room technique, and in the care of babies. ”