Nursing a Social Policy Statement

The authority for the practice of nursing is based on a social contract that acknowledges professional rights and responsibilities as well as mechanisms for public accountability. Values and Assumptions: Humans manifest an essential unity of mind/body/spirit. Human experience is contextually and culturally defined. Health and illness are human experiences. The presence of illness does not preclude health nor does optimal health preclude illness.

Definitions of Nursing:

Attention to the full range of human experiences and responses to health and illness without restriction to a problem-focused orientation. Integration of objective data with knowledge gained from an understanding of the patient or group's subjective experience. Application of scientific knowledge to the processes of diagnosis and treatment. Provision of a caring relationship that facilitates health and healing.

Knowledge base for Nursing Practice:

Phenomena of Concern: human experiences and responses to birth, health, illness, and death. Nurses focus on these phenomena within the context of individuals, families, groups, and communities. Diagnosis: facilitate communication among health care providers and the recipients of care and provide for initial direction in choice of treatments and subsequent evaluation of the outcomes of care. Interventions: direct or indirect, involve both physical and emotional intimacy. Giving physical care, emotional support, health teaching or counseling. Assisting recovery or a peaceful death Outcomes: evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions in relation to identified outcomes. Revise diagnosis, outcomes and plans of care.

Scope of Nursing Practice:

Basic Nursing Practice:
Graduates of approved school of nursing
qualified by national exam to be registered nurse
Baccalaureate degree
Care for patients and families
Interventions based on desired outcomes
Caregivers
Coordinators of care
Integrate patient service delivery
Prep for tests/procedures
Monitoring of responses to interventions

Advanced Practice Nursing:
Knowledge base:concentrating or delimiting one's focus to part of the whole field of nursing. Practice experiences: expansion refers to the acquisition of new practice knowledge and skills, including these legitimizing the role autonomy within areas of practice that overlap traditional boundaries of medical practice. Specialization advancement integration of theoretical, research-based, and practical knowledge that occurs as a part of graduate education in nursing.

Nurses in Advanced Practice:

Acquire specialized skills and knowledge through study and supervised practice at the master's or doctoral level in nursing. The term advanced practice is used exclusively to refer to advanced clinical practice.

APN Scope of Practice:

Distinguished by autonomy to practice at the edges of the expanding boundaries of nursing's scope of practice, preponderence of self-inititated treatment regimens, as opposed to dependent functions and complexity of clinical decision making and a skill managing organizations and environments

Oscar (born 2005) is a therapy cat living in the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Rhode Island, United States. He came to public attention in July 2007 when he was featured in an article by David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to Dosa, Oscar...

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