Assumptions

Major Assumptions:

1.  Nursing

2. Person/Cultural Being

3. Health

4. Environment/Culture of Organization

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Nursing

            Nursing is a holistic, relational, spiritual and ethical caring that seeks the good of self and others within complex community, organizational and bureaucratic cultures. The foundation of spiritual-ethical caring is love. Caring is cultural and social and encompasses beliefs and values of compassion, love, justice, or fairness in the social realm where relationships are formed and transformed. Caring is unique lens through which health choices can occur and where understanding of health and healing emerge. Through compassion and justice, nursing strives toward excellence in the activities of caring in dynamic complex cultural contexts of relationships, organizations, and communities.

Person/Cultural Being     

            A person is a spiritual and cultural being. Persons are created by God, the mystery of being, and engage co-creatively in human organizational and transcultural relationships to find meaning and value.

  

Health

            Health is a pattern of meaning for individuals, families, and communities. In all human societies, beliefs and caring practices about illnesses and health are central features of culture. Health is not simply the consequence of a physical state of being. People construct their reality of health in terms of biology, mental patterns, characteristics of their image of the body, mind and soul, ethnicity and family structures, structures of society and community (political, economic, legal, technological) and experience of caring that give meaning to lives in complex ways. The social organization of health and illness in the society (the health care system) determines the way people are recognized as sick or well, the way health or illness is presented to healthcare professionals, and the way health or illness is interpreted by the individual. Thus, health is intimately connected to the way people (including nurses) in a cultural group, an organizational culture, or a bureaucratic system construct reality and gives and finds meaning.

Environment/Culture of Organization

            Environment is a complex, spiritual, ethical, ecological and cultural phenomenon. This conceptualization of environment embodies knowledge and conscience about the beauty of life forms and symbolic (representational) systems or patterns of meaning. These patterns are transmitted historically, preserved, or changed through caring values, attitudes and communication. Functional forms identified in the social structure or bureaucracy (political, legal, technological, economic) play a role in understanding the meaning of  caring, cooperation, and conflict in human cultural groups and complex organizational environments. Nursing practice in environments therefore exemplifies the spiritual and ethical patterns of meaning as well as the elements of the social structure.