Florence Nightingale



Florence Nightingale

Introduction and Development of the theory

Florence Nightingale was a strong woman with a big heart. Nightingale advocated strict discipline, cleanliness, and felt that nurses should possess an innate empathy for their patients. She built the foundation for professional nursing and was a reformer of hospital sanitation methods. She founded the sanitary methods that we still use today.

Florence rebelled against her family and was determined to serve our society. In the 1800s, she developed an ambition to work in the hospitals. Her family was horrified because at that time, nursing was not a respectable profession. She was strong-minded and worked as a private nurse while attending school in Germany. Florence started training at a staff hospital in Crimea. She was horrified at the conditions. It was dirty and many soldiers were lying on the floor in filth while rats were running around spreading disease. When she heard the soldiers had an allowance of 1 pint of water per day for all uses, she was irate. She used personal finances to purpose essential medical supplies needed. She spent many hours in the wards; her nightly rounds giving personal care to the wounded soldiers gave her the name “Lady with the Lamp”. By the end of the 1854, an order had been created and the hospital was cleaner through Nightingale's efforts. The death rate fell by two-thirds.

Florence returned home to Britain and was the most famous Victorian second to Queen Victoria herself. As a woman, Nightingale could not be appointed to the Royal Commission, but she was the author of the commission's report of over one thousand pages that included statistical reports. She was instrumental in her work. She has been described as the 'the Passionate Statistician', and she wrote that Statistics is 'the most important science in the whole world'. This led to the establishment of an Army Medical School and a comprehensive system of army medical records. In 1855, while in Turkey, a public meeting was held to give Nightingale recognition for her work. There was an outpour of generous donations. By the end of 1859, she used her Nightingale fund to set up the Nightingale Training School. Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing to serve as a curriculum at the Nightingale school.

She became bed ridden due to an illness contracted in Crimea. She still continued to campaigning to improve health standards. Nightingale exhibited a gift for mathematics at an early age and she became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. She also was the first woman awarded the Order of Merit in 1907. Her work at the Nightingale school of Nursing still continues today. There are three hospitals in Istanbul named after Florence Nightingale. A medical center in Italy honors Nightingales contribution by giving the name “beside Florence” to a wireless computer system it developed to assist nursing. She deeply believed her work was a calling from God.

Concepts of the theory

Nightingales theory is based on natural laws ("Current Nursing ", ...