Contributor: Isabel Faia
The contemporary imbalance in environmental matters predominantly involve climate change and our supposedly beloved home planet’s ecosystems issues. Human beings are continuously disrespectful of their relationships with the universe ecosystem.
Humankind is responsible to a great extent for this state of “dysbiosis” of our planet, which is similar to the state of each person’s gut microbiome. This lack of balance and harmony in nature, is the root cause of the emerging of new and complex pathological challenges, which, like the Covid-19 pandemic, have become impossible to ignore. Countries the globe over have been forced to take very strict contingency measures, with different levels of freedom and restrictions in order to slow down the devastating effects of sickness and death that the virus has caused.
Healthcare professionals have an important role in managing the many menacing threats to populations of our planet, their well-being and survival. Nursing as a professional discipline, has many theories that can use used to as evidence for safe and competent practice. The concepts of Fawcett’s metaparadigm of nursing provide a way to understand and guide nursing during the pandemic – human beings, environment, health, nursing However, given the reality of our current world, other key concepts also provide paths that guide our understanding of the reality we face in the pandemic.
I contend that we are closing a cycle, a full 360° spin, that brings us back to Florence Nightingale’s work. From Nightingale’s framework, the nurse’s primary role is caring and helping people in their healing process. Nightingale told us that the environment is a key influencing factor in this process, which when operationalized, can increase the potential for recovery and survival. Nursing care in this framework emphasizes the optimization of ventilation and natural lighting of spaces, noise reduction, frequent hand washing and disinfection, hygiene of spaces, among other aspects of the environment. Nightingale supported the importance of these environmental aspects, by collecting and statistically analyzing data from everyday practice.
We can use the symbol of the lamp to illuminate the paths of what today’s nursing practice can be, and promote multidisciplinary recognition of nurses profound contributions to population health. We face the fact that 200 years since Nightingale’s ideas were first published, widespread recognition nursing at both the ontological and epistemological levels still remains a challenge to overcome. Therefore, we all have to effectively communicate to our communities worldwide a clear vision of what nursing is.
At a personal level, I have just completed two decades of my career as a nurse, predominantly caring for critically ill patients in the context of urgency/emergency rooms and also in an intensive care unit. This led to an experience marked by a great many interdependent nursing activities, which contribute to the progressive distancing from fundamental nursing theoretical thinking. I perceive myself in a state of profound professional numbness. Not meaning that the quality of my autonomous nursing activities were questionable, but instead were automatically executed and with little awareness of theory. This is similar to an experienced car driver, who over the years enters into a state of relative unconsciousness, an automated practice, when driving. This progressive loss of professional identity became evident in the scope of the Masters in Critical Care Nursing Specialty that I am currently attending at Univesidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon). When re-visiting in class the evolution of thought in and the production of knowledge throughout nursing’s history, in a short time and instinctively my practice gained the semantics of nurses’ expression, more specifically in content format and other implicit dimensions, as if it were on standby and with a click it would switch on. What seemed difficult to transfer into practice, proved to be the root of my daily professional practice.
That is why when I read the post The Impossibility of Thinking “Atheoretically” (Fawcett, 2019) in Nursology, suggested by the Master’s Nursing Theories Chairwoman, I cathartically identified with it. In my experience of hibernated nursing and of unconscious semantics, in the past I considered myself to be a nurse distant from theories, which would belong to an exclusively academic context. Now I confess that this process was a boost of vital energy, illuminating and motivating me to an increasingly challenging and exciting life as a nurse.
About Isabel Faia
I’m an ICU nurse since 2014, working for the past 20 years in a public hospital in Madeira Island, Portugal. Presently, I am doing a Masters in critical care nursing, at Health Sciences Institute, UCP Lisbon. This post was made in the nursing theories curricular unit of the Masters in Nursing Course of the Health Sciences Institute of UCP (Lisbon), with the pedagogical supervision of Professor Zaida Charepe (PhD, Associate Professor).