Development of nursing knowledge | MSN5270

I need replies to each of these two comments:

1. 

Nursing has significantly developed since Florence Nightingale in the 19th century (Henshall et al., 2021). Healthcare professionals must continually adapt to new technologies and state-of-the-art healthcare systems as more people take charge of their own health. Clinical and basic research with patients as the primary focus are included in the broad range of nursing research. The next generation of nurse researchers must be developed, and nursing must make sure that real scientific findings are put to use.

A framework for comprehending, interpreting, and forecasting occurrences in nursing practice is provided by major nursing theories. They give nurses a means to conceptualize their work, pinpoint patients’ needs, and create solutions that address them. Grand nursing theories offer a thorough and all-encompassing perspective on nursing practice (Wijaya et al., 2022). These ideas consider the patient’s social, psychological, and spiritual requirements in addition to the conventional medical model of care. They provide a framework for seeing the patient as a whole person rather than merely a collection of signs or symptoms.

A person is a biopsychosocial individual who constantly engages with a changing environment, based on the Roy Adaptation Model (Younas & Quennell, 2019). The environment contains focal, contextual, and residual stimuli. The Roy Adaptation Model highlights the significance of the patient’s adaptation to their surroundings, including their physical, social, and cultural milieu. Focus stimulation is the confrontation with one’s internal and external environment. This paradigm offers a comprehensive framework for comprehending patient needs, creating therapies, and assessing results.

Grand nursing theories also support nursing research. These concepts of nursing theories offer a theoretical foundation for planning and carrying out research activities. They aid in developing hypotheses, data analysis, and identifying relevant factors for the study (Wijaya et al., 2022). A paradigm for comprehending how patients can control their care is provided, for instance, by the Orem Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory. The design and execution of research studies on the self-care management of patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, have been guided by this approach.

The nursing grand theories cover a wide range of concepts and assertions that nurses may encounter when providing care in the most thorough ways possible. However, the concentration of nursing practice has shifted away from the conventional medical model and toward evidence-based treatment. In order to provide their patients the greatest care possible, nurses have to employ the finest available research (Senek et al., 2020). Grand theories in nursing are sometimes criticized for being overly abstract and needing more real-world direction for clinical practice. For instance, the Parse Human Becoming Theory has come under fire for being very abstract and without sufficient direction for therapeutic practice.

Grand nursing theories need to be updated because they frequently rely on erroneous assumptions about how to practice nursing (Roy, 2019). Many grand nursing theories of nursing were created in the 1970s and 1980s and are based on potentially outdated presumptions about nursing practice. For instance, the Neuman Systems Model was created under the presumption that the primary goals of nursing practice are preventing illness and promoting health. However, end-of-life, palliative, and patient-centered services now take up a far bigger portion of nursing practices. The value of great nursing theories ultimately hinges on their capacity to offer an insightful framework for comprehending nursing practice and directing interdisciplinary research in the area.

2. 

Theories in nursing play a major role in nursing education, practice, and the development of patient-nurse relationships. The theories have developed and been applied in nursing for over a hundred years. Over the years, though, these theories have evolved significantly to inform various aspects involved in the entire nursing industry. One of the major categories of nursing theories is the grand nursing theory. These remain the broadest of other categories and are concerned with the most abstract and complex concepts involved in nursing (Smith, 2020). Grand nursing theories provide a general framework of nursing as they can be applied in a variety of nursing environments and scenarios. Using the grand nursing theories, nurses, researchers, and educators can understand various patient cases at an abstract level as they try to navigate through them to get the most desirable outcomes. 

Due to their abstract nature, grand nursing theories are slowly becoming obsolete in nursing education, research, and practice. These theories are significantly broad in terms of scope and, to a greater extent, complex, and this means that they need rigorous research for the purpose of clarification (Wayne, 2021). Additionally, due to the complexity of the grand nursing theories, they fail to provide nurses with the specific instructions they need when intervening in handling patient cases. The theories provide just a general framework, and this makes them undesirable to use when handling a specific health issue. The theorists who came up with the grand nursing theories were mainly following their personal experiences and, in their time, and this is the reason why there are so many variations between the concepts presented in the theories and the real-world scenarios. At the end of the day, nurses, educators in nursing, and also researchers in this field have opted to use middle-range and practice-level theories and almost discarded the grand theories. 

Handling the discussion post provided me with an avenue to explore various learning outcomes of this course. I was able to critique grand nursing theories and unearth the reason why practicing nurses, educators, and researchers in this field shy away from using grand nursing theories in their daily operations. I also got to understand the impact grand nursing theories have had in fashioning and designing nursing holistically. I was also privileged to get the opportunity to explore how these grand nursing theories are applied in the entire nursing industry, even though they are not applicable in specific areas of practice, research, or education