Nursing Fundamentals

Nurses have many roles. A nurse may be an assistant to a medical specialist or part of the surgical team of doctors on their way to an operation. But nurses have specific duties to perform, not just mere assistants. You could at least point out five of those roles a nurse has to perform on a daily basis. The fundamentals of nursing could be as complicated as its demanding work at times, but the results are always rewarding.

Assessing a Patient
As soon as the patient is housed inside the hospital, a nurse almost immediately has to perform an assessment to the patient. This initial assessment might prove valuable later on, particularly with performing a diagnosis.

Diagnosis
Nurses, after conducting an initial assessment, could perform a simple diagnosis to their patients. A nurse might want to interview the patient further and diagnose the patient properly.

Nursing Care
Immediately after giving a simple diagnosis, a nurse has to devise a plan on how to take care of the patient. That plan though is in keeping with the assessment and its corresponding diagnosis.

Medical Intervention
If a patient is in need of further diagnosis, a nurse might be able use the services of a doctor. This will assure the patient that the initial medical attention has its confirmation with another medical staffer.

To Recap
After doing the necessary assessment and diagnosis, and providing initial medication to the patient, a nurse has the responsibility to evaluate the said patient. This evaluation would either give further medical attention or would recommend a release for the patient.

These are basically the fundamentals of nursing, the basic things that a nurse has to do in the course of his/her duty. Indeed, they have many roles, and it’s more than just assisting.

Importance of Fundamentals of Nursing

Fundamentals of nursing are the courses that teach the basic principles and procedures of nursing. In the fundamentals of nursing, the student attends classes and provides care to chosen patients. The course highlights the significance of the fundamental needs of humans and competence in fundamental skills as prerequisites to providing extensive nursing care.

The nursing practice has to be dependent and based on nursing theories. These theories are proven and tested for so many years. These theories are the basis of the nursing discipline and what makes it a profession. The nursing concepts supply direction and assistance for structuring professional nursing practice, advancement, and research. It also differentiates the focus of nursing from other professions. It is designed to guide assessment, involvement, and evaluation of nursing care.

The theories also supply a rationale for collecting reliable and valid data about the health status of patients. These are essential for effective decision making and implementation. They assist in creating criteria to measure the quality of nursing care. They develop a common nursing terminology to use in communicating with other health care professionals. Lastly, nursing theories improve the autonomy of nursing by understanding its very own independent functions.

In nursing research, nursing theories offer a structure for producing knowledge and new ideas. They guide in discovering knowledge gaps in the specific field of study. Eventually, they give a systematic method of identification questions for study, select variables, translate findings, and authenticate nursing interventions. To comprehend nursing theories, a theory, conceptual frameworks, theory and conceptual model must first be defined. A theory is a system of ideas that is proposed to describe a given phenomena.

Concepts are the foundations of theory, are abstract ideas or mental images of phenomena. A conceptual framework is a collection of related concepts and processes. It provides an overall view or orientation to concentrate thoughts. A conceptual model is an illustration or diagram of a conceptual framework.