Florence nightingale effect5/28/2023 The prime purpose of nursing is to give high-quality, compassionate, patient care, which can be ensured only with adequate training and administration.īest practice must evolve with advances in medical science, surgery, and related health sciences. Some of her ideas have yet to be implemented.Įight key components of Nightingale’s work and vision, it is argued, are still pertinent to nursing and health care today however, much of the details have changed. She was an effective writer, good at one-liners and the equivalent of sound bites. She was exceptionally well educated for her time, able to produce professional level reports and articles in all these areas, some with pioneering charts to present the data. Hospital reform and broader social reforms thus must always be kept in mind in pursuing Nightingale’s vision and work. The creation of the new profession was a key goal, but nursing itself was always a means to an end: quality health care. Nightingale and her influence, in other words, do not date back to time immemorial, but to a period not all that different from the present. Medicine, by contrast, dates back to the fifth century BCE in the West. Earlier, there were nuns who gave devoted care, but no regular, trained professionals. Nursing is not as old as medicine-Nightingale’s school opened in 1860, a convenient date to mark the birth of the new profession. Her pioneering “evidence-based” approach to nursing and health care still holds ( McDonald, 2001). Medical science, technology, and hospital buildings have changed greatly since her day, but the new challenges of antibiotic-resistant disease germs call for new thinking and possibly a revisiting of old techniques. Her insistence on high ethical standards, the centrality of the patient’s needs, cautions about innovations-she advocated starting small and evaluating before wider application-are all good advice today. The contention here is that many of Nightingale’s key principles are still valid and that not only nurses but also health care decision makers would benefit by paying attention to them. Nursing history courses or modules, which previously were common in nursing education, have largely been dropped from the curriculum. In any event, few nurses are interested in the history of their profession. She still arouses controversy and probably will continue to, the consequence of the power and originality of her ideas and the concerted campaigns she waged to see serious system changes effected. She is recognized worldwide as the major founder of nursing, and International Nurses’ Day is celebrated on her birthday, May 12. Why a new book now on Florence Nightingale’s nursing? Her active career ran roughly from 1850 to 1900, and the bicentenary of her birth is 2020.
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