Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework has been designed to provide organization to the nursing curriculum by serving as a guide for the selection of nursing content, ordering of courses, and sequencing of learning experiences.  There are six (6) major concepts that are central to the conceptual framework for the curriculum. These concepts, adapted from the Essentials of Baccalaureate Education (AACN, 1998) and the American Nursing Association Standards of Clinical Nursing Practice (1998) are defined as follows:

Person  Person includes the learner, individuals, families, groups, and communities.  Human beings are unique individuals who have dignity, worth, and respect.  They possess the capacity for compassion and caring for others and the right to self-determination.  Humans are complex, diverse, whole and unified beings whose physical, psychological, sociocultural, and spiritual needs are integrated and inseparable.  Throughout the life span, humans adapt to or modify an ever-changing environment as they strive to meet their needs and attain optimal health and development.

Environment  Environment is the total of both internal and external conditions and circumstances that have an impact on the development and adaptive functions of individuals, families, groups, and communities.  Environment includes physical, chemical, biological, social, spiritual, and cultural factors that interact with and influence humans and their state of health.

Health and Well-Being:  Health represents a dynamic state of being resulting from the interactions of humans and their internal and external environments.  Well-being is a perception of health and human existence, and is influenced by lifestyles and human experiences within the context of culture and society as a whole.  Humans strive to attain a high quality of life by integrating environmental factors, maximizing their potential, and engaging in health promotion, risk reduction, illness prevention, and rehabilitation activities.  Optimum health and well-being allows individuals, families, groups, and communities to advance beyond basic needs, and to focus energies on interpersonal, spiritual, social relationships, and self-fulfillment.  An individual’s state of health can vary from optimum well-being to illness, disease, and dysfunction and change throughout the life span.

Professional Nursing:  Professional nursing is a dynamic process that evolves as the nurse interacts with individuals, families, groups, and communities to meet potential or actual health care needs.  Based on the desired outcomes, professional nurses intervene to promote health and well-being, prevent illness, and assist with self-care activities that contribute to recovery or with activities that result in a peaceful death.

Caring:  Caring ‘encompasses the nurse’s empathy for and connection with the patient, as well as the ability to translate these affective characteristics into compassionate, sensitive, appropriate care” (AACN, p. 8).  Caring is providing assistance to and expressing concern for others to enhance their well-being and promote healthy growth and development.  Essential components of the caring process include knowledge, communication, self-awareness and development, and the professional values of altruism, autonomy, human dignity, integrity, and social justice.

Inquiry:  Inquiry is the seeking of information, knowledge, and truth through the processes of questioning, studying, exploring, or examining.  It includes the use of personal knowledge, reflective thinking, intuition, the nursing process, research process, and critical thinking.  Critical thinking is a deliberate and systematic process that involves “questioning, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, inference, inductive and deductive reasoning, intuition, application, and creativity” (AACN, p. 9).

Professional Nursing Practice:  Professional nursing practice includes direct and indirect theory-based therapeutic nursing interventions for the purpose of health promotion, risk reduction, illness prevention, and rehabilitation with individuals, families, groups, and communities.  In clinical practice, the professional nurse uses the nursing process to interact with clients in achieving mutual goals.  The nursing process is a deliberate and systematic approach that consists of activities related to assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation.  Application of the nursing process requires sensitivity to differences between the values of clients and the personal values of the nurse.  To provide therapeutic nursing interventions within the cultural, ethical, and legal domains of practice, the professional nurse engages in six interrelated roles.  As an advocate, the professional nurse represents individuals and/or groups to influence optimal health and well-being and/or correcting health care problems.  As a clinician, the professional nurse utilizes the nursing process as a tool to provide nursing care, which sustains life and health, promotes recovery from disease or injury and facilitates contending with its effects, or allows death with dignity.  As a collaborator/coordinator, the professional nurse values the importance of and works jointly with other members of the nursing profession and/or health cared disciplines to meet nursing care needs of individuals and multi-person groups.  As an educator, the professional nurse assesses and teaches individuals and multi-person groups with a focus on health promotion, maintenance, and wellness.  As a leader, the professional nurse utilizes independent decision-making, critical thinking, and problem solving skills to facilitate change within the health care system and./or nursing profession.  As a participant and user of research, the professional nurse reads, interprets, and applies research findings and participates in the scientific method as applied to clinical nursing practice.