I Dare You to Drink the Vinegar

The feeling we have when we can share suffering with another (or many) human beings. This is a gift of being human, this is an essential part of being a nurse. As we fumble together to find the best way that we can share this suffering, we grow as human beings, we grow as professional nurses. How can we conceptualize compassion in such a way that embraces it’s importance in nursing, and, in health care? I think that an unfortunate result of an increasing push to be more evidence based there is a push for nursing to be more technical, more empirically based, and less focused on the fluffy stuff. But, isn’t what some consider the fluffy stuff the foundation of nursing care? Is nursing about curing an illness, or is it about helping people and communities organize the conditions to maximize health? And how do we do this if the focus is the micro and the individual rather than the macro and the collective? And, how do the human and non-human co-exist? Discussion Questions: 1) What does...

Formulating and Presenting My Personal Philosophy of Nursing When contemplating a philosophical viewpoint within a particular discipline it is essential to understand its relationship to current issues in the field (DeKeyser & Medoff-Cooper, 2009; Schlotfeldt, 2006). Articulation of a personal nursing philosophy involves contemplation of one’s beliefs, principles and values which direct practice (p. 65, Uys & Smit, 1994 as cited in DeKeyser & Medoff-Cooper, 2009). My personal nursing philosophy began with attempting to answer the questions, “what does nursing mean to me” and “what is guiding my practice”? My philosophy is based on personal reflections, values and beliefs and is connected to the current body of nursing literature; it incorporates my understanding of the traditional nursing metaparadigm that includes person, environment, nursing and health (Monti & Tingen, 2006) and the concept of social justice proposed by Schim, Benkert, Bell, Walker and D...