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I've been on a mission for several years now about the nursing process. It seems to me that nursing faculty throughout the western world have both reified and deified the nursing process. Indeed, when I was a young faculty member in the 1970s, the nursing process was an enormous help to me in guiding students to THINK about what they were doing in practice, to recognize that nursing action was purposeful, goal-directed, and not merely execution of doctor's orders. But I soon found that not everything fit within the framework we called nursing process, or the related diagnosis-treatment model of nursing practice.
Virginia Henderson through her writings helped me to see the light. In a now classic article, "The Nursing Process- Is the Title Right?" published in 1982 and in later editorials (1987a, 1987b), Henderson traced the origins of nursing process. She pointed out that it was originally used to refer to aspects of the nurse-patient relationship, but that in contemporary usage, the relational aspects were largely missing. Instead, as used through the 70s and 80s, nursing process was focused on scientific problem-solving. Henderson was most disturbed that nursing process had become largely synonymous with nursing practice. She commented that the nursing process was neither THE nursing process, meaning the only process nurses use, nor the NURSING process, meaning that only nurses use...