Nursing

History

Nursing has a long history of existence. Promoting healing among the ill and caring for the sick and dying were roles taken on by relatives, hired labour, religious sectors and volunteers across time and place. With the roots of modern-day nursing dating to Florence Nightingale’s seminal and methodological approach to practice and research during the nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw the professionalization and scientification of nursing. Current-day nursing practice takes place within and across settings such as, but not limited to, communities, hospitals, primary health care, mental health care, public health, schools and policy sectors.

Education

Nursing education has seen rapid changes over the course of the past century. Specifically, with the expansion of the scientific paradigm across health disciplines, in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, nursing knowledge acquisition moved from informal to semiformal training, which often took place in hospitals and religiously affiliated hospitals. Beginning in the mid twentieth century, the education of nurses was further formalized as colleges and universities developed and offered programmes in nursing education. Currently, to become an RN, a minimum of 3 years of college education is required. In some countries, such as Canada, entry to practice requires a minimum of a university-based baccalaureate degree (except in the province of Quebec). Graduate nursing education has extended, with universities offering masters-level, and in some cases doctoral-level, nursing degrees. To enter academic positions, prior postdoctoral training is increasingly becoming a requirement. Higher levels of nursing education have had a reciprocal relationship with the rapidly growing research basis in nursing and recognition of the complexity of health promotion and health-care delivery.

Research

Current nursing research is influenced by scientific and naturalistic paradigms. As a result, nurse researchers can have expertise in quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods approaches. Ontologic and axiologic differences are overtly recognized as nursing students, beginning at the undergraduate level, are asked to reflect on the implications of paradigms on research approaches and methods. Depending on the research topic and the particular epistemological orientation of the nursing researcher, nursing studies can address a range of health questions and are very different from each other. For example, randomized clinical trials can be utilized to examine the efficacy of nursing interventions. Qualitative research traditions (e.g. ethnography, phenomenology, Grounded Theory or discourse analysis) can be applied to examine the health-related experiences of individuals, families or communities. As nursing researchers are gaining recognition across disciplines, they are increasingly leading multidisciplinary teams of researchers inquiring into nursing or health-related phenomena.

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