Together with this, patients and other clients provide nurses with a wealth of knowledge which gives them information about the practice. Expert nurses and advanced practitioners also help in developing their knowledge and skills to make sense of their practice. In interviewing their patients and other clients, nurses would know and find why they would rather adopt a family-centered health care. At the same time, interviews with them could help them understanding why the family is very important in supporting and providing care for their own children.
Nursing knowledge is also influenced by different indirect sources. According to Habermas, knowledge development is somehow related to the society in which the nurses live in. Human interaction and the legitimacy related to it tend to depend on the values and beliefs of powerful individuals in the society (i. e. doctors, managers, politicians, etc. ) These different people are very good in exerting their influence over the people and the society. Knowledge could also be obtained through the interaction with people.
The environment is comprised of people, surroundings and organizations. In using the environment as a source of knowledge, one could evaluate several health care systems that have undergone changes to meet the demands of family centered care. Based on personal knowledge, I was also able to see the importance of family-centered care. As mentioned, personal knowledge could also come from personal experiences. Having my son inside the hospital, made me realize the importance of the family in supporting the child patient.
Family-centered care aims to meet the physical, emotional, developmental and social needs of the patients, but at the same time support and strengthen the relationship between the family members, giving importance to their customs and values. Professionals under the family-centered health care system are encouraged to spend more time with the family, listen carefully to the patients’ families, make the family an essential partner in caregiving, are sensitive to the families’ values and beliefs, and are dutifully bound to provide the specific information the patients and their families need (arthritis. org, 2007).
In the same way, I was able to obtain knowledge through observation and investigation. Interactions with patients and their families gave me a better understanding of what family-centered care is all about. In the same manner, through the observation one gains from the patients who are inside family-centered health care systems, it is possible to look into the ethical implications of the topic in question. Ethical knowledge is thus gained from different moral issues.
It is possible to obtain such through observing nurses and other health care professionals as they make decisions that could affect their patients and their families. In the same manner, aesthetic knowledge is also obtained through one’s understanding of what patients are going through. In my experience, understanding what these patients go through gives me a clearer view of nursing, not just a profession but also an art. In using observation however, I was also able to get empirical knowledge on the particular topic.