Nursing as an Art

• Work environment requiring flexibility and greater accountability

• Caring for people everywhere • Largest health care workforce (5M

worldwide) • Rich diversity of knowledge and skills

• A commitment to quality • A readiness to change • Making a difference despite the

difficulties • Nursing is not merely an activity

supporting medicine • Expanding body of research

• Should demonstrate an appropriate balance between quality care and cost-effectiveness

• Reaffirm a critical human value of the profession, that of caring

• Ethical mandate of considering the costs and benefits of treatment in terms of preserving the patient’s human dignity and ability to function at the highest level of potential

• The need to identify the values and philosophy of nursing within the cultural, socioeconomic milieu of the country

• Identify which values and philosophy of nursing exists within each country

• “Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.”

• “The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty…”(American Heritage Dictionary, 2008)

• Communication • Entertainment • Political Change • Psychological and healing purpose • Propaganda/ Commercialism

• “Nursing is an art, and if it is to be made an art, it requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work, for what is having to do with the living body - the temple of God’s spirit… I had almost said, the finest of the fine Arts.”

(Nightingale as cited by Donahue, 1996)

• “Through her touch, the nurse may express that she care for him in a unique and tacit way.”

(Michalis, 2002)

• Nursing requires expressiveness as a possible instrument for the analysis of nursing in terms of art and aesthetic value.

(Michalis, 2002)

• A purpose of art, like nursing, involves communication of emotions to invoke a response.

(Sheppard, 1986)

• In every nursing task there is a conception of beauty seen as well as hidden, performed by the nurse daily through caring and healing.

(Michalis, 2002)

• You are an individual with:

–Unique identity

– Innate dignity

–And a part of human society

–Own personality

–Own character

• Refers to the moral values and beliefs that are used as guides for personal behavior and actions

• What a person is inside • Shaped in part by moral values • Develops in proportion to emotional and

intellectual growth • Involves the degree to which one understands,

directs and channels own feelings

• Governs relations with man and the agencies within which society operates

• Directs that we respect others, their rights, welfare and just due

• Being righteous, correct, fair and impartial • Authority to uphold what is right, just or lawful

• Provides for vision and a sense of balance in our lives

• Integrates our life activities to achieve a harmonious complete whole

• Guides our choices of action here and now • Provides a basis for the exercise of sound

judgment in practical matters

• Provides the control of responses made to difficulties and dangers

• Guides our use of reason in meeting a challenging situation

• Assists in the control of feelings, thoughts and emotions in the face of difficulty

• Inner resource that permits us to endure misfortune with patience

• Encourages constructive uses of pleasures of the senses

• Guides activities for growth and achievement within boundaries of self-control and moderation

• Enriches human life through rational control of one’s life’s essential functions and basic emotional drives