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Philosophy
The Faculty of the School of Nursing believe that nursing
is a practice discipline and an instrument of care in society.
Nursing is distinctive among the practice disciplines in its
angle of vision, intimacy, scope and privileged position in
relation to patients and concern with creating and using knowledge
to achieve practical and moral ends. Nurses are witnesses
to life's most profound events, especially when people are
at their most vulnerable. Nursing is an embodied practice,
transcending time and space - that is, always there - and
traversing boundaries usually considered relatively impermeable
and even inviolable. Nurses stand between patients and illness,
medicine and healthcare systems as mediators, buffers, translators,
facilitators and cultural brokers. By constantly reconfiguring
their practices to accommodate patient needs, situations and
locations, nurses model what dynamic, responsive and embodied
caring about and caring for are, and how such care is fundamental
to cure.
The Faculty believe that nursing education is the instrument by which nursing
becomes an instrument of care in society. Education at all
levels occurs in an environment of scholarly inquiry and is
variously oriented toward preparing students to care about
and for individuals through the lifespan and to participate
with individuals, families and communities to enhance well-being,
promote a healthful life, prevent injury and disease, ameliorate
the negative effects of injury and disease and their treatment,
and ensure a dignified and peaceful death. A healthful life
is one in which individuals and communities are able to fully
participate in the benefits of and conversations about health
and one that is not limited by place, poverty, prejudice or
violence. Students of nursing learn the benefits of forming
partnerships with individuals, families and communities at
various organizational levels to improve health and influence
practice and policy. Students of nursing learn to combine
their knowledge of the humanities, the biological, social
and nursing sciences, and clinical diagnosis and therapeutics
with their intimate knowledge of the particularities of patients
to provide biographically relevant, culturally sensitive,
evidence-based and ethically appropriate health care services.
In addition to using creatively knowledge from the sciences
and humanities in their encounters with the persons and communities
they serve, nurses produce knowledge that in turn contributes
to these sciences and the humanities and to the distinctive
knowledge of practice that is the forte of nursing.
The signature contributions of nursing and nursing education are to the generation, transmission and creative use of knowledge for practice, the enhancement of health, and the continuous improvement of health care. Practice knowledge comprises complex transformations
and syntheses of case, patient, person and system knowledge for the purpose of discovering and enacting workable and moral solutions to health care problems. As a steward of the public interest, committed to beneficence and the fair use of resources, the School
of Nursing maintains and improves resources for the benefit of the populations it serves.
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