Qualitative Nursing Research Report Analysis Essay

Qualitative Nursing Research Report Analysis - Essay Example However there has to be a methodology to integrate the practice of advocacy as integral part of the nursing curriculum. Moreover there is greater need for institutional support in practicing advocacy. Nurse's role of advocacy is as old as scientific nursing profession. Florence Nightingale advocated for the victims of Crimean war by insisting on the need for clean patient care environment. Advocacy was also obvious in the efforts of Clara Barton and other nurses during the American Civil War (Rogge, 1987). In the 70s the zealots in human rights movements took special note of the need for fighting for the rights of the patients. Nurse's perspective as one of the most important stake holders in health care, has a better role to play in this. The military model of health care with its language of loyalty and obedience primarily to the physicians and the legal model, where the focus is on the right of the patient, are the two models described in the nursing literature now. The complete patient centered healthcare is possible only with the realization of the unique identity of a nurse. The realization of the absence of thrust for advocacy in the nursing education should not deter the nurse from practicing it as has been done in the practice of military nursing in recent wars. The military tradition of nursing focused on loyalty and obedience to the physician. ... 33). This tradition of nurse started losing its popularity with the patient's rights movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Advocacy as a cardinal role for nurses was formalized during the 1970s when terms such as "loyal obedience" and "obeying physicians' orders" disappeared from the literature of the International Council of Nurses (International Council of Nurses, 1973) and the American Nurses Association. Nursing from then onwards took a new direction centered on the advocacy of the rights of patients as the important aspect of nursing practice. Empirical Research Segesten (1993) found that advocacy situations sprang from the helplessness of the patients. Millette (1993) highlighted the need for choosing the client advocacy model faced with choices like bureaucratic advocacy and physician advocacy. Snowball (1996) interviewed nurses concerning advocacy in their practice. She found that the important aspects leading to advocacy included nurses and patients sharing a common humanity and the cultural milieu being one of care. Snowball concluded that a therapeutic relationship was fundamental to advocacy. Conclusions drawn from the literature are that advocacy was initially included into nursing practice at the time when nurses developed a sense of service more for their patients than for physicians. Little empirical knowledge has been produced on the concept of nursing advocacy even though nurses consider advocacy to be central to their career. It is an anomaly that the empirical articles concerning advocacy contain no mention of how advocacy is inculcated or how advocacy is learned. Thus, the purpose of this study is to describe how nurses learn the skill of advocating for patients. Study Design A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was