Demystifying Nursing Knowledge Development: Issues, Solutions and Future Directions

Abstract

Nursing has evolved from its historical roots, influenced by multiple factors such as knowledge from other disciplines, methods, and processes of knowledge generation and theory utilization. Issues arise because nurses recognize the need for knowledge-based practice and envisage the focus of knowledge generation and utilization from theoretical framing guiding their practice. The borrowed or unique knowledge-based practice is grounded in philosophical and theoretical frameworks advanced through paradigmatic viewpoints within the metaparadigms of nursing. Encompassing a framework in nursing is the concept of caring. Caring in nursing uniquely contributes to appreciating nursing as a discipline of knowledge and a practice profession. Suggested processes involve knowledge-based, evidence-based, and theory-based practices within a conceptual-theoretical-empirical system. Moreover, because there is yet a continuing search for a universal theory of nursing guiding global nursing care practice, nursing must have contended with the plurality of theories dictating varying ways of practicing nursing.