Theoretical Foundation of Nursing
NURSING THEORISTS
Margaret Newman
- Health as Expanding Consciousness
(1979)
- An appropriate model for people loss
and eventual death associated illness
METAPARADIGM
 Man – connectedness
 Health – optimum system stability;
disease is a pattern or outcome of a
person’s life
 Nursing – act of assisting and
facilitate people to use the power
within them to evolve toward higher
levels of consciousness
 Environment – consciousness of
individual
IMPLICATION TO NURSING
PRACTICE
 Need of self-awareness, reflection,
and acceptance. This will entail
exchanging, communication,
perceiving, feeling, and knowing
 Need to MOVE (movement) =
CHANGE
 Apply the principle of HOLISM
 Goal of nursing is not to promote
wellness or to prevent illness, but to
help people use the power within
them as they evolve toward a higher
level of consciousness
 Holistic nurses must personally
develop high level of responsibility,
self care, reflection and spirituality
Rosemarie Rizzo-Parse
- Theory of Human Being (1981)
- Focuses on quality of life and human
dignity from the perspective of
clients, families, communities, and
particularly in qualitative research
studies about lived experience of
health and quality of life
- Guides nurses to focus on quality of
life from each person’s on
perspective as the goal of nursing
- Nurse is not focused on “fixing”
problems, but is viewing the client as
a whole person living experience
through his or her environment
- The client is a human being
METAPARADIGM
 Man – Human
 Nursing – art and science
 Health – no dichotomy in health or
illness
 Environment – the NOW
ELEMENTS OR MAIN THEMES
 Meaning – choosing personal
meaning in situation/experience
 Rhythmicity – co-creating, revealing,
concealing, enabling, limiting,
connecting
 Transcendence – transforming
 How an individual values
priorities
 To achieve human becoming,
one must live it, not just
practice it
LIMITATIONS
- Difficult for the novice nurse
- Lack of articulation with the body of
knowledge and psychomotor skills
that most nurses and society
generally attributed to the practice of
professional nursing