Nursing and Counseling Theories

MS-6650
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Nursing and Counseling Theories
The nursing profession is highly sensitive because people's lives are at stake. As such, nurses are mandated and obligated to provide quality care and treatment to all their patients and ensure their outcomes are improved significantly and quickly. They are supposed to apply not only the skills they learned in medical school but also experiences of working in the health care facilities to accomplish their duties effectively. In order to enhance their professional competencies, nurses are expected to combine their classroom with their practicum experiences. On this breadth, successful nurses often employ different theories in nursing and counseling to provide complete care to their patients. These theories are identified as sets of concepts and assumptions that facilitate the generation of further knowledge and provide direction that the nursing profession is to follow moving forward. These nursing and counseling theories provide nurses with diverse strategies and approaches in patient care. The key nursing and counseling theories include humanistic nursing theory and person-centered therapy, respectively.
Understanding the Humanistic Nursing Theory
As evidently identified from the title, the nursing theory focuses on the human aspect of the profession. It is attributed to Josephine Patterson and Loretta Zderad and is believed to have been developed over 50 years ago. The two theorists were keen on combining nursing with not only phenomenological but also existential philosophies. As such, they examined their individual experiences and connections with patients with the primary objectives of developing theoretical arguments that would serve as vital and fundamental guides to nursing professionals worldwide. Their sentiments were in line with the core idea behind nursing theories. According to Khademi et al. (2016), "A nursing theory is a set of concepts, definitions, relationships, and assumptions or propositions derived from nursing models or from other disciplines and project a purposive, systematic view of phenomena by designing specific inter-relationships among concepts for the purposes of describing, explaining, predicting, and/or prescribing". Based on the above statement, the humanistic nursing theory keenly examines the human experience in patient care.
The theory advocates for nurses to desist from looking at patients as numbers who visit their facilities to increase their revenues and profits. On the contrary, it encourages nurses to examine patients as individuals, find ways to connect in interpersonal perspectives, and consequently, collaborate in the development of the best care strategy (Khademi et al., 2016). The theory calls for continued dialogues with the patients to blend their emotional and personal perspectives in the treatment process.
I selected the humanistic nursing theory because I believe it is extremely vital for nurses to connect with their patients and involve them in the treatment process. Through engaging and interacting with the patients, nurses also get a vivid understanding of the m...