Nursing Care and Postmodernism

As a historical era, postmodernism signifies transition from inflexible and logical positivism and it is considered as an entry into a new view to science (1). Postmodernism offers a number of nursing practice revises including humanism, conditions, borderless, multi-voice, view, multicultural world, changes in meaning of knowledge, and life-long learning (2). Demographic changes, technological advances, ethnic and cultural diversity, poverty, and other issues have thus encountered nursing profession more than before with demanding challenges in the field of health care services (3). I personally believe that nurses’ philosophical thinking can have significant effects on development of patient care programs. Under the influence of postmodern assumptions, nursing care can also put emphasis on plurality, respect for cultural and individual differences, relativism of truth or reality, constructive discourse, different views to special knowledge, positioning, as well as listening to different voices. Besides, postmodernists reject traditional truth and any kind of centralism and work against consideration of a central truth in life.

 A postmodern nurse believes that humans possess an assortment of worldviews and they are additionally endowed with different perspectives of their own experiences. Postmodernists disapprove positivism and define it as a context stripper i.e. a significant negligence of interactions between humans and their surrounding environment. Accordingly, it can be assumed that, in this point of view, nurses are not able to ignore their surrounding environment for the reason that clinical circumstances are often unsystematic and chaotic and they are in the form of extracted, multiple, and almost uncontrollable interactions (4). In the era of postmodernism, knowledge, science and even images of nursing, health, human, and environment represent themselves as numerous realities. Therefore, the reality of postmodernism for nursing is an extensive one without any limits including extraction of horizon of meaning, importance of authority, personality traits, ethics, care-related communication, environment, sustainability, aesthetics, and interpretation. Therefore, postmodernism has achieved significant findings in nursing profession such as strengthening arguments, accepting alternative medicine, creating diversity in treatment methods, highlighting spirituality, ethics, and globalization of nursing, eradicating marginalization, as well as taking account of ethnic and cultural minorities. Postmodernism also draws attention to sociocultural and economic consequences as well as other factors involved in knowledge (5, 6).

Ultimately, it can be concluded that concentration on philosophical foundations of nursing is of utmost importance in this field. With respect to demographic diversity in today’s communities, postmodern nursing care is also evolving. In this kind of nursing care, differences are considered as positive, respectful, and acceptable ones and there is no superiority. Moreover, nurses cast doubt on authority of science, pay attention to others, give value to differences, go up against dominant culture, as well as they support minorities, public culture, regionalization, and localization.

Keywords:  Nursing Care, Nursing, Postmodernism

Ethical considerations 

Ethical issues (Including plagiarism, informed consent, misconduct, data fabrication and/or                    falsification, double publication and/or submission, redundancy, etc.) have been completely observed by the authors.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks all the professors who provided the conditions to carry out this research.

Financial Support

The author received no financial support for the research, author-ship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of Interest

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.