{"title":"Deconstructing nursing's paradoxical relationship with the concept of complexity.","authors":"Tracey L Clancy","doi":"10.1111/nup.12487","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although nursing seems to understand itself and its practice as complex, the literature is less clear about what this actually means. While complexity is discussed as an attribute of nursing, it is also suggested that complexity in nursing remains misunderstood and poorly articulated, is devalued, is not considered as a measure of health outcomes and remains invisible. Despite the overarching lack of a definition, some nurse scholars have conceptualized complexity as a complex intervention. For these authors, complexity becomes a complex intervention defined as that which is composed of component parts interacting in a variety of ways that influence the delivery of and outcomes of health-related interventions for populations. Conceptualizing complexity as a complex intervention forces nursing to embrace and adopt a received interpretation of complexity as expressed through complexity theory and complexity science. While complexity theory may afford us some tools for thinking about complexity, when we deconstruct nursing complexity to explicitly determinate and quantifiable tasks, this artificially narrowed orientation to complexity reveals an oversimplified explanation of the complexities associated with nursing and serves to blind us to its real qualities. Through a consideration of complexity from a Western philosophical tradition, I demonstrate that when nursing adopts the received interpretation of complexity as a complex intervention, this perspective on complexity contains nursing epistemologically and ontologically. I offer an extended conceptualization of complexity framed upon the consideration that nurses assume complexity and do not reduce it; that nurses have the capacity to not be paralysed by complexity and have developed logics to mobilize it in productive ways. Mobilizing complexity through navigating paradox and contradiction shapes an orientation to complexity that embraces an extended epistemology. This extended epistemology is characterized by a 'yes/and' mindset that expresses the dynamic and generative relationship between forms of knowledge which reflects complexity that characterizes nursing.</p>","PeriodicalId":49724,"journal":{"name":"Nursing Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nursing Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12487","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"NURSING","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Although nursing seems to understand itself and its practice as complex, the literature is less clear about what this actually means. While complexity is discussed as an attribute of nursing, it is also suggested that complexity in nursing remains misunderstood and poorly articulated, is devalued, is not considered as a measure of health outcomes and remains invisible. Despite the overarching lack of a definition, some nurse scholars have conceptualized complexity as a complex intervention. For these authors, complexity becomes a complex intervention defined as that which is composed of component parts interacting in a variety of ways that influence the delivery of and outcomes of health-related interventions for populations. Conceptualizing complexity as a complex intervention forces nursing to embrace and adopt a received interpretation of complexity as expressed through complexity theory and complexity science. While complexity theory may afford us some tools for thinking about complexity, when we deconstruct nursing complexity to explicitly determinate and quantifiable tasks, this artificially narrowed orientation to complexity reveals an oversimplified explanation of the complexities associated with nursing and serves to blind us to its real qualities. Through a consideration of complexity from a Western philosophical tradition, I demonstrate that when nursing adopts the received interpretation of complexity as a complex intervention, this perspective on complexity contains nursing epistemologically and ontologically. I offer an extended conceptualization of complexity framed upon the consideration that nurses assume complexity and do not reduce it; that nurses have the capacity to not be paralysed by complexity and have developed logics to mobilize it in productive ways. Mobilizing complexity through navigating paradox and contradiction shapes an orientation to complexity that embraces an extended epistemology. This extended epistemology is characterized by a 'yes/and' mindset that expresses the dynamic and generative relationship between forms of knowledge which reflects complexity that characterizes nursing.
期刊介绍：
Nursing Philosophy provides a forum for discussion of philosophical issues in nursing. These focus on questions relating to the nature of nursing and to the phenomena of key relevance to it. For example, any understanding of what nursing is presupposes some conception of just what nurses are trying to do when they nurse. But what are the ends of nursing? Are they to promote health, prevent disease, promote well-being, enhance autonomy, relieve suffering, or some combination of these? How are these ends are to be met? What kind of knowledge is needed in order to nurse? Practical, theoretical, aesthetic, moral, political, ''intuitive'' or some other?
Papers that explore other aspects of philosophical enquiry and analysis of relevance to nursing (and any other healthcare or social care activity) are also welcome and might include, but not be limited to, critical discussions of the work of nurse theorists who have advanced philosophical claims (e.g., Benner, Benner and Wrubel, Carper, Schrok, Watson, Parse and so on) as well as critical engagement with philosophers (e.g., Heidegger, Husserl, Kuhn, Polanyi, Taylor, MacIntyre and so on) whose work informs health care in general and nursing in particular.
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
