Florence Nightingale's Environmental Theory

The environment plays a big role whether or not the patient would develop Surgical Site Infections. The postoperative period extends from the time the patient leaves the operating room until the last follow-up visit with the surgeon. This may be as short as one week or as long as several months.

During the postoperative period, nursing care focuses on reestablishing the patient’s physiologic equilibrium, alleviating pain, preventing complications, and teaching the patient self-care. Careful assessment and immediate intervention assist the patient in returning to optimal function quickly, safely, and as comfortable as possible.

According to The American Academy of Tautology’s Head and Neck Surgery, 30 years ago, approximately 90% of tonsillectomies in children were done for recurrent infection; now it is about 20% for infection and 80% for obstructive leap problems.

The rise in the incidence of tonsillectomy is one of the major phenomena of modern surgery, for it has been estimated that 200,000 of these operations are performed annually in this country and that tonsillectomies form one-third of the number of operations performed under general anesthesia in the United States.

There are, moreover, features in the age, geographical and social distribution of the incidence, so unusual as to justify the decision of the Section of Epidemiology to devote an evening to its discussion. Glover, 2008. The environmental aspects of Nightingale’s theory ventilation, warmth, quiet, diet, and cleanliness remains a significant component of current nursing care until today. These concepts, even from the 21st, showed significance as the global society encounters new issues of disease control.

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Like for instance, sanitation and water treatment somehow controlled sources of diseases and sickness. In places such as clinics and hospitals, the control for room temperature for an individual patient is also considered.

Also, the same environment, though it contains technology that helps for recovery, may create uncomfortable noise that would affect the leaning process. Nightingale’s theory has been used to provide general guidelines for all nurse practitioners for a number of years. The universality of her concepts still remains relevant except for some specific activities. The concept of the nurse, patient and environment are still applicable and relevant in all nursing settings today.

Florence Nightingale believed that disease was a reparative process; disease was nature’s effort to remedy a process of poisoning or decay, or a reaction against the conditions in which a person was placed. Nightingale did not provide a definition of nature. In her ratings, she often capitalized the word nature in her writings, thereby suggesting that it was synonymous with God. However, when she used the word nature without capitalization, it is unclear whether or not the intended meaning is different and perhaps synonymous with an organic pathological process.

Nightingale believed that nursing role was to prevent an interruption of the reparative process and to provide optimal conditions for its enhancement. Nightingale felt that nurses needed to be excellent at the observation of their patients and the environment. She also believed that persons desired DOD health and that they would cooperate with the nurse and nature to allow the reparative process to occur or alter their environment to prevent disease. Nightingale strongly believed that appropriate manipulations of the environment would prevent diseases; this concept underlies modern sanitation activities. Octavia & Ballista, 2008. As nursing practice moves toward a caring paradigm, nurses seek creative ways in which to create healing environments for their patients.

Nurses look to nursing roots for guidance and knowledge. Nightingale’s environmental adaptation theory Of mind-body-spirit integration with environmental factors, including auditory, visual, olfactory, sensory, tactile, and cognitive modalities, provides a framework for actualization caring-healing practices in a transposable caring model. Schmuck, 2009. As an infection control nurse of a regional hospital, the researcher was eager to know the effectiveness of Nightingale’s theory which is said that her approach could help fight infection in modern hospitals. She also intended to find out how such measures could be applicable in the present hospital setting. This study is aimed to apply environmental factors of Florence Nightingale for post-tonsillectomy patient In order to speed up the recovery, decrease expenses, and lower the chances of readmission.

General Statement of the Problem

This will enhance his recovery in a natural way using environmental factors thus decreasing additional hospitalizing costs. Patients Family. Patient’s folks will benefit from this study as they will be educated on how to utilize their environment at the hospital and as well as at home to help in the recovery of their patient since they are the ones who have close encounter with the patient. Healthcare providers. This study will help healthcare providers to focus more on the improvement of external factors of the environment that old affect their patient and his healing process.

This study would serve as a basis for patient’s care to help patients recover faster. Nursing Educators. This study will aid in developing insights about environmental intervention that could greatly help in the patient’s optimum health recovery. This can also be helpful to future researchers as a basis of their study and to nursing instructors for their lectures. Present Researchers. Researchers can benefit from this study as they can compare and correlate certain findings and recommendations that resulted from this paper whichever relevant to their own study.

Community Leaders

This study could be helpful to community leaders when it comes to concerns in their community’s health, sanitation and other environmental aspects that they are combating their community. Being educated with this study, they can also impart to the population groups in their area the importance of maintaining sanitation and good hygiene in their own houses and surroundings as well as to family members that would need hospitalizing. Hospital Administrators.

It is important for hospital administrators to be knowledgeable enough of the ideal set-up of hospital wards that would be advantageous to the patients, which are considered to e the most important people in the institution. Nursing Service Personnel. This study is very beneficial to the Nursing Service of hospitals since this IS focused on nurses’ initiative in implementing the said theory in caring for the patients. In this chapter the theoretical framework, conceptual literatures and research studies that are relevant to the project paper are presented.

It includes result of the researcher’s view of concepts and studies which are deemed significant to the present study in terms of content, methodology and procedures. The researcher’s readings of the reviewed materials also provided her basis in analyzing her own data as well as in coming up with interpretations of data and recommendations based on data results. Conceptual Framework There were various literatures related to Nightingale’s Environmental theory. Her renowned nursing skills were honed on the dirty and chaotic battlefields of the Crimean war.

But Florence Nightingale could still teach modern hospitals a thing or two about infection control, according to an expert. DRP Jack Gilbert, head of an international project to categorize all now bugs, said modern hospitals could lower rates of infection by being slightly less sterile. Sterile conditions in wards and operating theatres may be doing more harm than good by wiping out organisms that keep dangerous microbes at bay, he believes. Opening windows and allowing fresh air into wards could boost populations of “good bacteria” which help keep harmful bug populations under control, he explained.

DRP Gilbert said: “There’s a good bacterial community living in hospitals and if you try to wipe out that good bacterial community with sterilization agents and excessive antibiotic use you actually lay waste to this green field of protective layer. “Then these bad bacteria can just jump in and start causing hospital borne infections”. The theory mirrors advice from Florence Nightingale who her 1 860 work “Notes on Nursing” wrote of the importance of keeping patients’ windows open and allowing a breeze in.

A study published last month by University of Oregon scientists found that rooms in clinics where windows were left open had a wider range of bacteria, while those that were kept sealed had a higher proportion of potentially harmful germs. Proof Mark Inherit, a microbiology expert from Bath University, said ensuring a good air flow in hospitals was important, but said that describing them as too clean would be “quite an extreme view”. The concept of environmental influences on healing has been known since Florence Nightingale, a nursing leader, cared for soldiers of the Crimean War.

New generations of critical care units are being designed to promote healing in a humanistic manner that can meet the holistic needs of patients and their families. The interaction between humans and the different environments in which they are placed has long en known. Florence Nightingale was famed for her focus on sanitation and other aspects of the environment that contribute to the health and healing Of the patients. She was not only a leader in improving sanitation and ventilation, but was also instrumental in bringing forth the body-and-mind connection.

She understood that the environment played a central role in a patients healing of body and mind. Nightingale went on to influence the healthcare environment by varying the patients visual perspective, utilizing color and natural light more effectively, and eliminating excessive noise. This early nursing leader was passionate about the nurse’s role to create a milieu that would give a patient the best opportunity to heal. Environmental Noise “Unnecessary noise, or noise that creates an expectation in the mind, is that which hurts a patient.

Such unnecessary noises undoubtedly induced or aggravated delirium in many cases. ” Noise is one of the most insidious environmental stresses found in the hospital environment. On any ward, noxious noises can include the hum of medical equipment; bubbling of chest tubes; staff conversations; pagers and intercom systems; inning of telephones; opening and closing of doors, cabinets, and supply carts; and even the clattering sounds from the wheels of a passing cart.

These unfamiliar and unexpected noises can startle anyone, but especially a patient already stressed from a physiological strain. Designing a critical care environment that supports a healing atmosphere by reducing ambient noises takes into consideration many design elements, such as flooring ceiling material, and doors and nursing station placement.

Creating a Cue

True among the staff that fosters a healing environment includes encouraging behaviors that decrease unnecessary noise, such as keeping hallway conversations low, especially at night; avoiding over-the-bed conversations; turning pagers to vibrate; avoiding the use of overhead paging; turning off unused biomedical equipment; and modifying or repairing unnecessarily loud equipment. Environmental Light “Second to their need for fresh air is their need for light is not only light but direct sunlight. The usefulness of light in treating the disease is all important”. Light, like sound, can have both positive and negative influences on the human body and mind. All living things need light to exist, and light contrasted with darkness guides the tempo of the body’s 24-hour circadian rhythm. Providing natural light or full-spectrum light is the best choice. Light has healing properties, and light therapy has been instituted as part of the treatment plans of many diseases.

Many forms of light exist, and a variety of therapies that use light are being studied. Photocopying therapy is being tested at the Baylor Research Foundation in the treatment viruses, and light therapy is being used to treat seasonal affective disorder and insomnia. Available lighting options are nearly endless, thanks to changing technology, miniaturization of components and systems, and the wide variety of lighting choices available. Meeting the lighting needs of patients and caregivers is not the difficult challenge it has been in the past.

Color in the Environment

“Little as we know about the way in which [we are] affected by form, by color, and by light, we do know this-?that they all have an actual physical effect. People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery. The relationship between light and color dictates that neither can exist without the other. In fact, light and color enhance each other’s life and energy.

There are seven colors in the visible spectrum of light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet; all of these colors are present in visible light. The response of the body and mind to color is influenced by cortical activation, the autonomic nervous system, and hormone activation. Color evokes emotional responses that produce feelings of serenity or agitation that can aggravate or alleviate stress Color can also affect an individual’s motional state, inducing cheerfulness, agitation, or calmness.

Nightingale reportedly used brilliantly colored flowers as a therapy for recovery. Over the centuries, various cultures have used color for its healing powers. Color has electromagnetic energy that can influence healing in similar ways to sunlight. The field of chromatograph uses color as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of various disorders. Science is in the beginning stage of investigating colors healing nature. Color by design can be used to supplement the existing light in patient rooms and contribute to the healing milieu.

Environmental Landscape

“That they should be able, without raising themselves or turning in bed, to see out a window from their beds, to see sky and sunlight at least, if you can show them nothing else, I assert to be, if not of the very first importance for recovery, at least something very near to it.” Staring at the same four walls can have just as deleterious a consequence on a patient’s recovery as the chaotic environment produced in the critical care environment.

Creating a healing milieu in the critical care environment necessitates that clear consideration be given to the design Of he environmental landscape as well as the feelings and emotions of the individual enmeshed in that environment. A revolutionary study by Lurch found that postindustrial patients recovered more quickly when exposed to a window view than did those without this view, suggesting that changing the healthcare landscape reduces stress and has a positive effect on medical outcomes, including speed of recovery, and reductions in length of stay and cost.

Air Quality

“The first essential to the patient, without which all the rest that you can do for him is nothing. Keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air. The human sense of smell is inexorably linked with the environments in which people live. The information received through the senses evokes physiological responses and feelings. Scents stimulate the olfactory system and can trigger an immediate response. Buckle, 2001 The sense of smell plays a significant role in how humans perceive and react to environments in which they are placed.

The basic medicinal smells of a hospital environment evoke strong reactions without even considering the potential for additional noxious odors. Just the “hospital smell” can produce anxiety and increase art rate and respiration, let alone the reactions to the smell of blood, vomit, feces, and infections. Other suggestions include removing offensive odors from the immediate environment as quickly as possible and providing other, more pleasant odors to supersede the noxious ones, such as vanilla, lavender, and mint.