Regenerating Nursing's Disciplinary Perspective

Abstract

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first national symposium on nursing theory development, the need to clarify nursing's disciplinary perspective is just as relevant as it was 50 years ago. The purpose of this article is to regenerate the disciplinary perspective by analyzing the literature on the focus of the discipline of nursing, synthesizing the themes and suggesting areas of knowledge development for the discipline, and imagining ways to move forward in claiming, clarifying, and strengthening the discipline. The 4 themes identified were human wholeness, health/healing/well-being, human-environment-health relationship, and caring. Nine areas of inquiry generated from the disciplinary perspective were suggested.