Nursing Scholarship Essay

998 Words2 Pages

Scholarship is a concept that can mean many different things to many different people. As nursing students, scholarship is a concept that we began developing before we started our formal nursing education, will continue to hone during nursing school, and will utilize every day as professional nurses. Scholarship is not something that comes from a singular source, but rather something that is the product of many different experiences, ideas, and types of knowledge. For nurses, it is the synthesis of knowledge from liberal education, knowledge from a variety of disciplines, and the integration of ways of knowing and thinking in nursing that promote scholarship, which in turn leads to the promotion of safe, quality patient care.
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Carper identifies four fundamental patterns of knowing that contribute to the structure of nursing knowledge and the promotion of safe, quality patient care, including empirics, esthetics, personal knowledge, and ethics (1978). According to Carper, empirical knowledge is knowledge of the science behind nursing practice (1978). With empirical knowledge, a nurse relies on the scientific facts she has collected throughout her years of education and experience and applies them to patient care in order to provide the best care possible. Knowledge of esthetics, according to Carper, is knowledge of the art of nursing (1978). Esthetic knowledge allows the nurse to rely on her perceptions and intuitions about what a patient really needs to creatively design and implement the types of care that will be the most effective and satisfying for her patient (Carper, 1978). The third way of knowing, personal knowledge, involves knowing, recognizing, and utilizing the role the individual self plays in nursing practice (Carper, 1978). Carper introduces the idea of therapeutic use of self, in which the nurse sees the patient as more than just an object that needs tending to and instead as another human being to form a relationship with (1978). Personal knowledge drives the nurse to think of how she would want to be treated if the roles were reversed, and motivates the nurse to engage the patient in every aspect of their care so they receive quality care that is tailored to their specific needs. The last way of knowing, ethical knowledge, is defined by Carper as encompassing a nurse’s sense of the right versus the wrong thing to do in a given patient situation (1978). A nurse has to rely on her moral intuition to make sure that every judgment call being made on a patient’s care are all ethical and in the best interest of the

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