Humanistic Nursing by Loretta T. Zderad (good short books TXT) 📕

[7] Norman Kiell, The Universal Experience of Adolescence (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), pp. 22-44.

[8] Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1958).

[9] Hesse, Steppenwolf, p. 60.

[10] Plato, The Republic.

[11] Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1973).

[12] Frederich Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil," trans. Helen Zimmern, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1927) and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." trans. Thomas Common, in the Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1927).

[13] Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

[14] Norman Cousins, Who Speaks for Man? (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953).

{49}

5

Research is an inherent component of humanistic nursing. What condition of humanness is necessary in the nurse for the actualization of nursing's research potential? This chapter will attempt to share some brooding and mulling on this problem.

Nurses practice within ever-moving, changing settings where formulated plans frequently and suddenly go awry. Unexpected patient needs arise. Powerful others make both reasonable and unreasonable demands. Depended on others fail us due to human frailty or lack of dependability. The nurse's setting, her researchable area, is the extreme opposite of her colleague's, the laboratory investigator's. Her area is beyond research control measures. Too, it lacks the quiet isolated atmosphere conducive to contemplation and creative thinking associated with research.

Conversely, it is oversaturated with the "stuff" of meaningful existence. It can stimulate questions to the frenzy of immobilization. The human nurse's system can become overloaded. Such overloading reflects the humanness of the nurse; like all man she can envision possibilities beyond any human being's ability of fulfillment.

Nurses know there are events in their commonplace worlds that scream for human interpretation, understanding, and attestation. The question becomes "how." This "how" depends on more than concretes and events in the nurse's setting. This "how" depends on relevant "ifs." The meaningfulness of the nursing world will be actualized conceptually "if" this is supported by institutional economic and administrative planners, other nurses, and intradisciplinary colleagues. For knowledge available and visible to nurses in the health setting to be preserved, conceptualized for durability, it needs to be valued by the institutional health community. Still, most necessary to its duration is the appreciating of this knowledge by the nurse, herself. {52}

Initiation of a Nurse Researcher

The nurse student, recently arrived in her experiential world, is awed with the need to be cognizant of multitudinous factors. At this initial introductory phase one could say her "being" as a nurse is programmed or imprinted with: It is your responsibility to report and attend all the things that influence the response and comfort of those for whom you care. This programming supports and is supported by any already existing tendencies within the nurse student toward unrealistic, perfectionistic expectations of self.

Then in research courses, usually positivistically geared, her programming jams. Her system is fed: Select out, isolate, focus down on a single question, limit your variables, establish a protocol of operation, control for reliability and validity, tunnel your vision, and safeguard objectivity. The jamming is the result of the human nurse's capacity to see relationships between the part and the whole. Human intelligence, as a condition of humanness, demands this relating of one thing to another. Often such relating is intuitive, human, based on much thinking for purposes of understanding and solution. Yet, often it cannot be substantiated fully and conceptualized logically at specific times, therefore it is subjective.

To highlight the obvious in the above I attempted facetiousness. Many nurses acutely aware of the complexities, contradictions, and inconsistencies of their nursing worlds have struggled and used the positivistic method in research studies. Hence, they have isolated a researchable question, stated their basic assumptions, hypothesized outcomes, selected samples, established experimental and control groups, formulated methodologies, searched out and utilized appropriate findings, and have made recommendations. Usually these research efforts have advanced scientific knowing and knowledge of existents within the health-nursing situation. And yet, often these efforts have discouraged the research wonderment of the nurse interested in the nature and meaning of the nursing act and how the event of nursing is lived, experienced, and responded to by the participants. These positivistic research methods have made available answers. Still, they have not answered the questions most relevant to nursing practice and to nurses.

These nurses were certain that man generally could not be prescribed for interpersonally; he was not predictable, not yet an automaton. Faced with alternatives men often surprised. Consequently these positivistic approaches to studying human events, unless one forced one's data crowbar style, always terminated with a kind of miscellaneous category. Man's undeterminedness makes him all-at-once frustrating to study, impossible to distinctly categorize, and excitingly mysterious and the most worthy focus of nursing research. {53}

A Nurse Researcher's Presence in the Nursing-Health Setting

The existent, a nurse labeled researcher, in the health world brings a disquiet that has to be understood and endured. Necessities for scientific study in the nurse's world of the nursing event or situation are wonderment, concern, and responsibility. Open adherence to such qualities frequently startles others into speculating about the researcher. She, herself, becomes an oddity. Persons ponder the possibility of her study's having a hidden agenda that involves them. Over time these persons generally accept or reject the searcher's efforts. If rejected the searcher is often labeled a worthless nosey troublemaker. Subtly it is conveyed among those involved that she is to be interfered with often by mechanisms of ignoring or forgetting or righteously setting "patient's needs" above conforming to the study plan. For instance, how often have research nurses met with responses from staff at the time of their planned arrival on a unit to work with a patient, "Oh, he seemed to need activity, he was restless, I forgot you were coming, I sent him to the gym," or "Oh, (surprise) did you want to give the patient his morning care? That was done a while ago; we give care early." If accepted the searcher is often labeled an interested, interesting person whose efforts are to be fostered because her findings will enhance situation nursing. The distinction frequently is based in staffs' responses to the searcher's personality more than in the value of the issues of the investigation.

Significant to negative staff responses toward a nurse searcher is the necessity for her to withhold information. This withholding may be necessary to protect the study results. For example, it is necessary when a special type of patient care is being tested against usual patient care or when confidentiality is an issue. Confidentiality requires a nurse, searcher or not, to censor communications when personal knowledge of individuals make them identifiable. The need for confidentiality can be determined by the nurse's considering the knowledge gained in view of whether it will or will not influence the over-all treatment plan. If it will affect the plan, there is reason to reveal it; then it must be related in a manner that insures the patient's continued protection and, if possible, with his permission. If over-all treatment is not influenced, one must censor the knowledge gained to check one's own free communications. Would the patient want it revealed; is it knowledge of a quality that brings ridicule, is looked at negatively or nonacceptably in our particular culture generally? Is it of a sensitive nature and therefore knowledge we do not just reveal to anyone?

Other patient care givers may sense this withholding by the nurse searcher. They may reasonably accept it or unreasonably not accept it. The researcher may or may not be aware of or concern herself with her colleagues' sensitivity. This would depend on the searcher's usual modus operandi and on the importance she associates with her colleagues' sway in her investigation. The latter can be much greater than is obvious. {54}

Confidentiality—Description: Humanistic Nursing

Humanistic nursing practice theory proposes phenomenology, a descriptive approach to participants in the nursing situation as a method for studying, interpreting, and attesting the nature and meaning of the lived events. Humane nursing is not humanistic nursing within this theory unless that which becomes visible to the nurse in the nursing situation is shared in a durable form with colleagues.

Confidentiality, then, becomes an important issue in humanistic nursing. No scientific methodology of research is affixed with "ought" or "should" virtues regarding knowledge gained. In nursing, a professional helping realm, a practitioner or researcher is wed to "ought" and "should" virtues. The knowledge gained "ought" to be dispersed to colleagues for their increased understanding. It "should" enhance the constructive force of the profession. To so enhance it "must" be communicated in a manner that allows understanding while protecting distinct individuals and groups. Words and conceptualized ideas are the tools of phenomenology. Protection of distinct persons and meaningful communication can be augmented through the utilization of abstractions, metaphors, analogies, and parables. So humanistic nurses, as practitioners and researchers, are inherently responsible for their manner of being, responding, and consciously sculpturing knowledge into words.

Responsibility When Sharing: Understanding of Man

How does a nurse searcher, who wonders, notices, relates, and comes to know, become humanly responsible? Nietzsche's philosophical works would direct a nurse searcher to look at her values. The values known through looking at what determines her actual behavior considering how these values correlate with her privilege of calling herself, nurse. Empathy, knowing how another experiences, when coupled with the title, nurse, dictates a performance that encompasses no harm to others and hopefully benefits them. Despite the human excitement of discovery, disciplined effort and rigorous evaluation enter into preparing knowledge of man for dispersal. Revelation should not merely shock; rather, professionally we use shock to awaken surprise, a fundamental, for human constructive movement toward moreness. The former, mere shock, needs to be guarded against. The latter, shock to awaken surprise needs to be exactingly, uncompromisingly attended for the communicability of knowledge and the actualization of the phenomenon, nursing.

In considering confidentiality and the quality of knowledge of man available to me, as nurse, my consciousness is confronted with my former mentor, and internalized "Thou," Paul V. Lemkau, M.D., psychiatrist. He {55} emphasized repeatedly that the professional person, as he increasingly understands man, should take on increasing responsibility to man, one's self and one's others. Buber says, "As we become free … our responsibility must become personal and solitary."[1] One can extend this and say that to help others struggle for freedom one must realize that others must responsibly decide and that although they do this through and in the authentic presence of a nurse, these others are alone in deciding. And nurses in deciding what and how to convey of their knowing must decide freely, responsibly, personally, and alone.

The nurse in deciding what and how to convey, considering the professional necessities of both confidentiality and dispersion of knowledge, can be guided by a conception of the nature of man-in-his-world. Man in humanistic nursing practice theory is viewed as a conflictual, contradictory, inconsistent dilemma. One horn of the dilemma is ideal spirituality that wrestles against the other horn, protective materialistic animalism. This "all-at-once" struggling, stretched, mixed nature of man needs recognition. Recognition of man's nature, as such, supports greater self-acceptance. Self-acceptance and this view of man-in-his-world, like a magnifying glass, unmasks for a nurse her possible responses, motivations, and alternatives. Cognizant of these, she can responsibly select what knowledge to disperse to protect individuals and to continually shape and conceptually actualize the nursing profession. Utilizing this magnifying glass on self in humanistic nursing practice theory to let one's existing mixed, varied, struggling responses, motives, and alternatives into self-awareness is an axiom referred to as authenticity with self.

Acceptance of the others' human nature or human condition of being is usually easier than acceptance of our own. Usually each man is his own severest judge. Lilyan Weymouth, R.N., clinical specialist, my past teacher and present friend, in sympathetic moments, speaking of suffering others, often says, "the poor devils." Once, feeling anxious and annoyed, I responded, "we are all poor devils." She retorted, "I am glad you recognize that." Stopped short, I found myself continuing to ponder the phrase, "poor devils." Man's dilemma is that he is neither saint nor devil. He is a "poor saint" and a "poor devil," and by his nature he is pushed and pulled in both directions, "all-at-once." Our human existence in the world calls for an enduring with our virtues and vices, our energy and our laziness, our altruism and our selfishness, in a word with our humanness.

What meaning does this conception of man have for humanistic nursing practice theory? This theory necessitates a nurse who accepts and believes in the chaos of existence as lived and experienced by each man despite the shadows he casts interpreted as