Plato, Nightingale, and Nursing: Can You Hear Me Now?

ConclusionOver 100 years after her death, the impact Florence Nightingale still has on professional nursing practice remains. Scholarship in nursing education today is infused with a liberal arts background in philosophy, ethics, and the sciences. Nightingale's holistic concepts of person, health, and environment in the practice of nursing coalesced with her statistical analyses in validating nursing actions foreshadowed the development of universal nursing knowledge and language base and meta‐paradigm concepts in nursing. Further classification and categorization of Nightingale's concepts of assessing, implementing, and evaluating delivery of care became the linguistic precursors for the identification of nursing process, nursing actions, and nursing diagnoses. Nursing implicationsPlato's and Nightingale's holistic, scientific, and humanistic approach to living, and to care practice in all its dimensions, grounds the discipline of nursing in a liberal arts and critical thinking matrix, elevating nursing to higher ethical, safe, and professional levels of standards.
Source: International Journal of Nursing Terminologies and Classifications - Category: Nursing Authors: Tags: Original Article Source Type: research