NURSING THEORIES: THE UNITARY PARADIGM NEWMAN • ROGERS • PARSE

Margaret A. Newman

Health As Expanding Consciousness. emphasizes pattern recognition and transformation. focuses on recognition of the evolving person–environment pattern; health includes disease and is understood as expanding consciousness.

Martha E. Rogers

Science Of Unitary Human Beings. emphasizes human– environmental field patterning. views human beings and environments as irreducible, pandimensional energy fields in continuous mutual process; nursing promotes harmonious patterning and well-being.

Rosemarie Rizzo Parse

Human Becoming Theory, emphasizes meaning, choice, and true presence. focuses on humanuniverse, personal meaning, rhythmic patterns, freedom, and cotranscending with possibilities; nursing is lived through true presence.

Newman’s definition of Person

A unitary, open being continuously interconnected with the universe and engaged in an evolving pattern of the whole. • The person cannot be understood by separating the individual into isolated parts. • Consciousness includes cognitive and affective awareness as well as the interconnected processes of the entire living system. • Each person expresses a unique life pattern through relationships, choices, movement, and experiences.

Newmans’s definition of Health

the pattern of the whole and includes both disease and non-disease. Illness does not necessarily mean loss of wholeness; it may be a manifestation of the person’s total evolving pattern. a transformative process toward more inclusive consciousness. Pattern recognition enables the person to perceive alternatives and discover new possibilities for action.

Newman’s definition of Environment

Individual patterns interact with family, community, and the wider universe. the larger whole within which individual consciousness exists and evolves.

Newman’s definition of Nursing

helps the person recognize relationships and recurring life patterns. centers on caring relationships and recognizing the person through patterns.

Central theory

health is the expansion of consciousness

Roger’s definition of Person

is a unitary human being, an irreducible, indivisible, pandimensional being identified by pattern. The whole has characteristics that cannot be predicted by studying individual parts alone. • Human beings are open systems and are continuously changing. • Each human field has a unique pattern that manifests the person’s identity and life process.

Roger’s definition of Health

is an expression of the life process and of the continuously changing human and environmental field pattern. Pattern manifestations may be experienced as illness, disease, or well-being

Roger’s definition of Environment

is an irreducible, pandimensional energy field that is integral with the human field.

Roger’s definition of Nursing

both a science and an art concerned with people and the world in which they live. • Its purpose is to promote health and well-being through understanding human environmental field patterns. • Professional practice promotes harmonious interaction between human and environmental fields.

Integrality

the continuous mutual process of human and environmental fields; neither can be understood as separate from the other

Resonancy

continuous change in wave patterns from lower-frequency, longer-wave patterns toward higher-frequency, shorter-wave patterns.

Helicy

continuous, innovative, unpredictable, and increasing diversity of human– environmental field patterns.

HUMANUNIVERSE

Parse views person and environment as inseparable and irreducible; she uses this term to emphasize their unity. is indivisible, unpredictable, everchanging, and continuously cocreating reality. Human beings freely choose meanings and ways of becoming within their situations.

LIVING QUALITY

is defined by the person—not by the nurse or by an external standard of normality. • It reflects the person’s lived experience, priorities, hopes, values, and meanings in the emerging now. • Health-related experiences therefore must be understood from the individual’s own perspective.

Parse’s definition of Nursing

is a science whose practice is a performing art, lived through relationships with persons, families, groups, and communities. • The nurse practices true presence being genuinely available and attentive to moment-to-moment changes in meaning. The nurse does not impose what the patient should value, but respects freedom, dignity, and personal choice.

Meaning

people give and take meaning through speaking, silence, movement, stillness, values, hopes, and day-to-day living. personally chosen.

Rhythmicity

people live unique, continuously changing patterns of relating with others, ideas, objects, and situations.

Transcendence

people move beyond the present toward new possibilities, hopes, dreams, and ways of becoming.

Newman

focuses on recognition of the evolving person–environment pattern; health includes disease and is understood as expanding consciousness.

Rogers

views human beings and environments as irreducible, pandimensional energy fields in continuous mutual process; nursing promotes harmonious patterning and well-being.

Parse

focuses on humanuniverse, personal meaning, rhythmic patterns, freedom, and cotranscending with possibilities; nursing is lived through true presence.

Clinical difference

Newman emphasizes pattern recognition and transformation; Rogers emphasizes human– environmental field patterning; Parse emphasizes meaning, choice, and true presence.