Pinoy Nurses

Period of Contemporary Nursing

Period of Contemporary Nursing

This covers the period after the World War II to the present. Scientific and technological development as well as social changes marks this period.

Events and Trends
Ø Establishment of World Health Organization by the United Nations to assist in fighting disease by providing health information and improving nutrition, living standard and environmental conditions of all people.
Ø Use of atomic/nuclear energy for medical diagnosis and treatment.
Ø Utilization of computers for collecting data, teaching, establishing diagnosis, maintaining directory, making payroll, record keeping and billing.
Ø Use of sophisticated equipment of diagnosis and therapy.
Ø The advent of space medicine also brought out the development of aerospace nursing. Colonel Pearl Tucker developed a comprehensive one-year course to prepare nurses for aerospace nursing at Cape Kennedy.
Ø Health is perceived a fundamental right. Laws were legislated to provide such right.
Ø Technological advances such as development of disposable supplies and equipment have relieved the nurse from numerous tedious tasks.
Ø Development of the expanded role of the nurse. The nurse is constantly assuming responsibilities in patient care which were formerly the sole responsibility of the physician. Nursing became a dynamic profession because the scopes of nursing practice.
ØIs expanding in the light of the modern development in the constantly changing world.

Contemporary nursing is rooted in a past that is composed of a concatenation of events, certain conditions and prevailing philosophical trends that marked different periods of the history of humankind. However, nursing has a complex past and the question ‘’how and why nursing was created?’’ is always present. The core of nursing is the provision of care, and the beginnings of nursing go back deeply in the history of humankind. Therefore, the past of caring traditions and the historical past of nursing influenced the configuration of contemporary nursing, and they will probably continue influencing the future developments in nursing.
The foundations of modern nursing were set in the late 19th century by Florence Nightingale, whose philosophy was deeply influenced by Plato (LeVasseur 1998). Studying the concept of nursing in Nightingale’s writings, one recalls Plato’s ideas about education. According to Plato the purpose of education is the metamorphosis of young persons to deliberate citizens who are expected to have an impact on the furtherance of their community (Plato, Republic). In resemblance, according to Nightingale, the aim of nursing education was to train women to become nurses in order to serve society for the alleviation of the suffering of the sick, for the amendment of the living conditions of the poor, and for the improvement of the health of the population (Nightingale 1859). Nightingale strongly believed in the ability of statistics to convey the truth by revealing the underlining reasons that produce the phenomena and thus interpreting them. She was also convinced that statistics can prove the effectiveness or lack thereof, of any applied intervention (McDonald 1998). Using statistical analyses of cross-correlations she showed that the high mortality rates in the hospitals of her era were due to the crowded patient rooms, as well as the lack of sufficient fresh air and sun light (Nightingale 1859). Furthermore, Nightingale supported that humans, as social beings, are subject to the influence of social and moral laws. The need for conformity with them is similarly imperative, as is imperative the conformity of the natural phenomena to the natural laws (Nightingale 1860). Therefore, Nightingale developed a framework concerned with health education and the care of the poor and ill persons in their houses (Nightingale 1859, 1892). Florence Nightingale used her social class, her scientific knowledge, and expedient in the British society of 19th century, in order to establish the foundations of a profession for women. She did so by establishing the first nursing school at the St. Thomas Hospital of London. However, nursing still had a long way to go before reaching its complete maturity and its establishment as a science.
Roughly, a hundred years later, on the opposite coast of the Atlantic Ocean, the scientific era of nursing began in the USA, and the first nursing theories began to surface (Henderson 1966, Rogers, 1970, Jonson 1974, Watson 1985, Parse 1987). Nursing scholars were aware that nursing, in order to acquire an independent scientific and professional entity, had first to answer the question "what is nursing?" through a theoretical framework. Nursing theories were initially based on the scientific theories of allied sciences and therefore, a circle of discussions started about whether and how much those ‘‘nursing’’ theories covered the whole spectrum of nursing, and if they were indeed theories or simply theoretical models or frameworks (Reily 1975, Stevens 1979, Adam 1985, Flaskerud and Halloran 1980, Kershaw, Salvage 1986, Salvage, Kershaw 1990).
In the late '90 and at the beginning of the 21st century, although some new theories and models evolved (Kalofissudis 2000, Sapountzi-Krepia 2002), the interest for the decipherment of the nature of the existing nursing theories began to weaken, the search for one unique nursing theory began to recede and a new circle of discussions about the nature of nursing started.