The Influence of Nursing Theory on Public Health and Consulting Practices

Nursing theory is a systematic way of looking at health care frameworks. It’s not limited to a specific set of ideas and can be considered more of a patient care library of sorts. Almost as old as the profession itself, nursing theories have matured over the years. 

Florence Nightingale, for example, famously developed the modern notion of environmental nursing, a theory through which she established that the environment in which a person is healing in can have a big impact on their overall experience. 

It sounds obvious, but only because people like Nightingale pushed the envelope and developed new takes on old practices. In this article, we take a look at how nursing theories can influence public policy and private practice.

What Are Nursing Theories?

Call it a living library of sorts. Nursing theories are a collection of ideas, not necessarily all canonically factual, but tested, examined, and experimented with. 

The central framework behind any nursing theory is that it focuses on four concepts central to the profession: the person receiving care, their health, the setting that they are receiving care in, and the nurse himself or herself. 

In other words, the action that they take to facilitate the care. Essentially, they provide a sort of academic foundation for the entire profession.

Key Nursing Theories

There are way too many celebrated theories for us to do justice to the notion, but even with that, there are a few so famous that it would be absurd to exclude them. 

The most famous of these is probably Florence Nightingale’s theory on the environment. We referenced it a little bit in the introduction. 

It was a revolutionary thought at the time. Florence Nightingale suggested that the details of care, not specific to the illness itself, were every bit as important. 

The lighting in a room, the cleanliness of the health care environment, the food the patient was eating. All indicators of how likely the patient is to recover. 

It’s a direct extension of this particular nursing theory that has paved the way for the clean, professional hospital rooms we now take for granted.

Also important to the canon are Jean Watson’s ideas on human caring theory. Watson took on the interpersonal aspect of health care, zeroing in on the value of empathy and compassion flowing from care provider to the patient. And with that, she made canonical the archetypal image of the caring nurse that anyone who enters a hospital will inevitably leave with.

There are more. Dorothea Orem’s self-care deficit theory. The idea alive in this theory suggests that there are varying degrees by which a person is able to perform self-care. Nurses are then required to enter and fill in the gaps within these deficits.

Totalled there are dozens of ideas in the nursing theory canon that have directly shaped modern healthcare. 

The Implications on Public Health Policy

So it’s easy enough to see how nursing theory plays an important role in shaping hospital policies or even nursing education initiatives. What does it have to do with public health policy? 

Theory-based policy initiatives that are based on health care deficits can naturally play an important role in filling in some of the gaps communities experience today in Western society. 

Remember that all a nursing theory really is is an observation that has been tested and honed through years of experience.

A nurse notices a problem, they develop ideas about why it is taking place and what should be done about it. That’s the theory. 

And if their ideas are good enough and effective enough, they become a standardized component of care. Communities could naturally benefit from a similar logic when developing policies.

Where are the deficits in how community health is regulated? How can we make things better? 

Finding answers to those questions is the basic point of nursing theory. What community wouldn’t stand to benefit from more of that kind of thinking? 

Nursing Theory in Private Practice

Health care consultancy firms work with hospitals to troubleshoot specific problems. These issues could be related to patient outcomes or they could be more procedural in nature.

In any case, their idea is to figure out what’s going wrong and develop a bespoke solution for it. 

Does that sound familiar? It’s the basic principle behind nursing theory. Health care consultants typically have a strong understanding of these concepts and may work with hospitals to help them find new and better ways to embody the ideals of the established health care canon.

If you’re interested in becoming a healthcare consultant there are several degree options you can pursue.

Most of them involve pursuing a graduate degree in healthcare administration, but some nursing leadership degrees are also applicable. 

A Constantly Evolving Body of Ideas

At the end of the day, that’s all we are talking about, isn’t it? Every academic discipline has its body of ideas. Nursing is particularly rich in that regard. 

The ideas we’ve touched on in this article are no fixed. They’re a fluid part of the established healthcare eco-system. 

Nightengale’s ideas of what a hospital environment should look like were revolutionary in the 19th century when they first began to circulate. 

They paved the way for how hospitals look today—but they also don’t perfectly reflect modern healthcare standards. Ideas are like snowballs. They change and grow with time. 

So too does public health policy. If lawmakers can lean into the wisdom and logic of hundreds of years of nursing, our world will be the better for it.