Marilyn E. Parker

Aesthetic Knowing Grounded in an Explicit Conception of Nursing

This article presents an expanded perspective of aesthetic knowing in nursing grounded in the theory of nursing as caring. The authors highlight Carpers contributions to nursing, applauding the value of her work. However, a major limitation of Carpers work on aesthetic knowing is the failure to provide an explicit conception of nursing to guide the search for patterns and structure of nursing knowledge, thus the limited development of the aesthetic pattern of knowing in nursing. The authors propose that aesthetic knowing in nursing is the creating experience in the nursing situation, expression of the experience, and appreciation of it through encounter.

Knowledge-based Evaluation of Nursing Care Practice

Providing people with a complete and responsive healthcare solution requires a multi-tiered health service delivery system. One aspect in the healthcare hierarchy is the need for care provided by nurses. Nursing care and observation provide the basis for nurses to communicate their practice with others in the healthcare system. It is necessary to capture and manage knowledge of nursing care to improve the quality nursing practice. This paper proposes a novel knowledge-based decision support system for nurses to capture and manage nursing practice, and further, to monitor nursing care quality, as well as to test aspects of an electronic health record for recording and reporting nursing practice. As part of ongoing collaborative research of the nursing school and the department of computer science, a prototype toolset was developed to capture and manage nursing practice in order to improve the quality of care. A case study is presented to demonstrate the toolset used by nurses in a local hospital environment.

Assuring Nursing's Voice in the Electronic Health Record

Language is essential as a mode of communication to preserve and transmit knowledge and culture. The distinct language of a profession gives meaning to terms and expressions as well as knowledge of needs and appropriate responses in a given situations. Since Nightingales direction to record observations, nurses have built their language to record purposes, experiences and meaning of their practice. Today, the nursing voice is missing in reporting software; it is difficult to record the caring essence of nursing within electronic health records. There is a need for research and development of software to communicate nursing that takes place during nurse-client and nurse-community health encounters. A team of university professors and graduate students in nursing and computer science has joined to generate nursing practice research data for use in creating and testing nursing language software. Data reflect the complexity of caring in nursing grounded in a distinctive community nursing practice model. The software is intended to complement other electronic health records, assuring the voice of nursing in reporting health care. This paper emphasizes identification of the problem and literature review. The work of the research team, the research approaches and initial results are included.