My philosophy of nursing is based around the idea of a unitary person. For me, it is not possible reduce the fact of being a nurse to the actions that one performs on a ward or in a doctor’s surgery. Rather, if one is to understood what it actually mean to be a nurse, then it is necessary to be able to fit one’s own actions into a schema, and to understand the manner in which they may be taken to relate to a wider context. Not only may this fact be taken to describe something crucially important about being a nurse, but it can also be taken to describe a key aspect of my own nursing philosophy. I have frequently found in both my professional and my personal life that this ability to combine an understanding of the particular needs of person with their wider needs and context is essential to being able to give care. As such, my philosophy is one that attempts to nurse according to an understanding of a person’s environment, while simultaneously understanding that they themselves are not reducible to such an environment. This paper will delineate the experiences which have led me to this conclusion, and will also describe the influence that the nursing philosophy of Martha Rogers has had on both life and my nursing practice. In particular it will pay attention to Rogers’ understanding of Unitary Human Beings.
My Philosophy of Nursing
My decision to pursue nursing as a career emerged as a result of personal experience of illness and of caring and being cared for. As child I was admitted to hospital several times, and although each time the disease was effectively treated, I would often feel unsatisfied or as if I was like to fall ill again, regardless of the fact that I had been seen and treated effectively. Importantly, I now think that I found visits to the hospital in my home town to be psychologically damaging. Throughout these visits my symptoms were treated as if the existed in isolation from the rest of my life. While this was not necessarily an ineffective way of treating my condition, it did leave me feeling unsatisfied, and ultimately I believe that it contributed to the development of depression in my teenage years. This changed, however, when I encountered nurses who rather than simply viewing my as a series of symptoms appeared to take a genuine interest in the totality of my life and to see my as a composite person. Although there was not necessarily a huge amount of time to discuss elements of my life with nurses who were responsible for giving care, I found that they seemed to be genuinely interested in my life as a whole, and that this view of me as a whole person actively enabled my recovery. I see now that experience suggests I was pre-disposed towards a theory of the Unitary Human Being.
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"A Unitary Nursing Philosophy".
As a result of this positive experience I found myself drawn towards a career in nursing. I knew that I wished to be able to treat people as whole human beings and to study disease as it would relate to all aspects of a person’s life. Now, not only do I feel that this philosophy enables me to gain a clear view of the lives of the people that I am treating, but I also feel that it provides enables me to treat people effectively. As I will now show, this is an area of my thinking which as been largely influenced by the thinking and nursing practice of Martha Rogers.
Martha Rogers’ Philosophy of Nursing
For me, the most important thing for my intellectual growth as a nurse was finding a theory that understand people as whole human being, and also as more than the sum of their parts. As a nurse and theorist, Rogers’ thinking can be understood as starting primarily from the idea that individuals are more than the sum of their parts and that they should be seen to participate in systems and environments which may lead to unpredictable behaviour and “manifest singular and unpredictable symptoms” (Armstrong & Kelly, 1995). Martha Rogers drew her nursing philosophy directly from her understanding of contemporary physics and combined it with an inherent emotional intelligence. Rather than seeing people as simply information, Rogers argued that they should be seen as manifesting energy fields. While some argued that this philosophy amounted to a kind of scientific mysticism, for me its most important aspect is its concentration on the singular nature of individual people, and its ability to combine this with a desire to understand such people as necessarily embedded within their environment. Indeed, it is the combination of a relational understanding of a person and the belief that this person cannot be entirely reduced to simply a map of their environment that I understand to the most important aspect of a theory of a Unitary Human Being. It this which makes Rogers’ thinking on nursing especially powerful.
The potential use of this thinking for practical nursing may be made more clear if one considers the implications for Rogers’ thinking for understandings of ideas of health and wellness. Rogers understands health as the capacity for “expression” between different fields, and with it the ability for an individual to engage in a dynamic relationship with their environment (Rogers, 1970, p. 24). According to this thinking, an individual may be understood as being healthy when they are able to interact with their environment in a manner that changes both them and this environment. The concept of movement and dynamism is crucial to such an understanding of health, as the very idea of being well is related to the context within which one finds oneself, combined with one’s ability to affect and be effected by that context.
The history of this thinking as it is presented is Rogers is clearly related to contemporary understandings of physics and the nature of waves and energy fields. In particular, Rogers argues that changes in a person’s environment which may or may not be related to an illness should essentially be understood as a change in the nature of the “waves” that constitute this person’s energy field and their relationship with the environment (Rogers, 1970 p. 63). While this theory may seem to be outdated, it nonetheless provides a way of understanding how both illness and health should be understood affecting a person’s entire life. In essence, it understands a person as a unitary human being. Such an understanding enables a holistic approach to nursing and one which speaks both to my own experience of illness and recovery, as well as to the most rewarding aspects of my own personal nursing practice.
Conclusion
In conclusion, my personal philosophy of nursing is one that attempts to see people as necessarily related to others and to their own social environment, while also understanding that they cannot be be reduced to this. This is a philosophy that has developed both from my own experience of illness and recovery, and from my reading and appreciation of the work of Martha Rogers. I am drawn to Rogers due to her understanding of health as dynamic interaction, and her insistence that a person is a member of their environment without being entirely reducible to it. In essence, I am drawn to the idea of people and patients as Unitary Human Beings.
- “Martha Rogers.” (1993). Nurse Education Today, 13(2), 157.
- Armstrong, & Kelly. (1995). More than the sum of their parts: Martha Rogers and Hildegard Peplau. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 9(1), 40-44.
- Ireland, M. (2000). Martha Rogers’s odyssey. The American Journal of Nursing, 100(10), 59.
- Rogers, Martha. (1970). An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. New York: F.A. Davis & Company.
