Where Have All the Nursing Theories Gone?
Yes, where have all the nursing theories gone? This seems like a logical question after reading Nursing Outlook's special issue on nursing science "Council for the Advancement," 2015) which is totally devoid of any mention of what is commonly known as nursing theory. The authors (most are fellows in the American Academy of Nursing) of the four articles, three commentaries, and one response to the commentaries about "nursing science" integrated ideas from the Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science regarding PhD education. The authors had similar messages all of which focused on what should be included as nursing science in PhD education. The emphasis was on the biological and behavioral sciences, including but not limited to technologies, omics, and symptom science as the essential content of nursing science at the PhD level. The explicit and tacit message is that all nursing knowledge derives from positivism and biomedical sources. The nurse leaders who authored these articles and commentaries wrote that nursing science should include more of the biological and behavioral sciences so nurse scientists could be more competitive with other scientists, rather than considering nurse scholars' unique contributions to the human universe health phenomenon. These authors ignored the theoretical work of a century of nurse theorists and scholars who strove to design theories that made up the body of nursing knowledge. These theorists for example, Peplau (1988) Rogers (1992) and many others who created the foundation of nursing science fostered beliefs and values that cocreated a unique nursing discipline focusing on the health of human beings as whole entities, concerned with adaptation, self care, goal attainment, caring, humanbecoming, energy fields, expanding consciousness, and cultural care (see Smith Parker, 2015) The latter notion of what constitutes nursing science has been both the hallmark of editorials and articles published in Nursing Science Quarterly for 29 years and a consistent subject of other nursing science focused journals. What nursing science is has been defined specifically by nurse scholars throughout the current and last century (Barrett, 2002; Cody Mitchell, 2002; Eriksson, 2002; King Fawcett, 1997; Parse, 1987, 2000, 2015a, 2015b; Peplau, 1988; Rogers, 1992; and many others) (see Smith Parker 2015) In fact, in 2000 the American Academy of Nursing's Expert Panel on Nursing Theory Guided Practice formulated, agreed upon, and published the following statement about nursing science:
Nursing science quarterly