Nursing is the profession of providing care for the sick. Nursing is much more than strictly providing patient care because it is a discipline that is focused on a person’s health and healing. Nurses focus on giving quality care to their patient, patient’s family and to the community. Nursing practices consist of knowledge in philosophy, theories, concepts, principles and research. Nursing theories guide nurses by organizing knowledge and explaining experiences which guide their thinking. Nurses assess the situation, identify the problem, make a plan, implement the plan and then evaluate. A paradigm is a worldview that includes values and perspective. How we think and our experiences help us in making a paradigm. In nursing, the paradigm is based on sharing concepts, such as a patient, health and environment. These concepts are reflected in our nursing training, work experience, values and beliefs that influence our observation on any situation. The theoretical lens filters and focuses our views, looking for patterns and interrupting meaning. There have been multiple paradigms developed in nursing. One discipline developed by Newman focuses on caring for the human health experience. She identified three other paradigms in nursing: particulate-deterministic, interactive-integrative and unitary-transformation.
