It's helpful to know why we do what we do and where nursing started to know how far we've come. Florence Nightengale helped me a lot to know that I wanted to be a nurse and not in a different part of the medical field.
It's important because you learn a foundation for all your evidence based practice. Infection control is a part of nursing history no matter what. Learning about it and how things evolved, is basically like learning about your new phone before you start to use it.
I find myself it’s so important to learn how those pioneer nurses started and developed our profession. It’s inspiring to know those brave ones who helped in the war, assisted doctors for surgeries, and quite frankly devoted to help the community… we can all learn from them and remind ourselves why we do this hardcore work especially this crazy time. Then we can stay our standards high, not low grade any robots could do. I say this because current healthcare system is forcing us to become robots for all about money …
It may be helpful for higher level nursing theory classes
IMO there is no importance for todays bedside staff nurse to study the history of nursing. It is not relevant. Many will disagree with me, and that’s ok. I would replace the time talking about the history with talking about preparing nurses for todays reality of nursing: workplace violence, organization, legal aspects in nursing, documentation, self care (mental, emotional, physical) delegating etc.
I also believe most of the outdated theory’s of nursing need to be retired… except Benner, she was spot on.
