Two Center of Nursing Philosophy fellows have been selected for a PODIUM presentation at the International Philosophy of Nursing Society (IPONS) at its next meeting.
“This is a major achievement in their PhD careers,” says Miriam Bender, director of the center and an associate professor at the school.
IPONS is a group that exists to bring together individuals from different countries into an international network to promote and support the growing discipline of nursing philosophy.
Chelsea Baker
My nursing background has been primarily in public health and behavioral health, with an increasing interest in epidemiology and communicable diseases.
My primary research interest is tuberculosis, including the role of geographic place in disease risk and transmission dynamics. Model-based approaches are familiar in public health and epidemiology and in a broad sense are used to consider the ways in which various sociodemographic, biomedical and environmental factors may interact within the unique context of a given community to impact health outcomes.
In reading the philosophical literature on models and science, I was led to consider whether nurses in a variety of clinical settings might employ a related approach on an individual level to provide care that is continually informed by the unique context of a given patient.
This paper is a synthesis of empirical and philosophical ideas focusing on the concept of model-based reasoning in nursing.
Zahra Sharifiheris
I am a PhD student holding bachelor’s and master’s degree in midwifery.
My area of interest in research is women and children’s health focusing on maternal mental health and healthy pregnancy. I have two years of experience in women’s hospitals and clinics serving women during their pregnancy or any pathologic situations.
It was hard to come up with a single problem out of a bunch of health issues that women experience. To make it doable in a PhD program, I narrowed my focus down to maternal mental health during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, when women experience most of the pathological alterations.
My plan is to apply technology-based devices to track women’s mental health and a potential autonomic nervous system biomarker (HRV) in low-risk pregnancy. This assessment would give some valuable insights into women’s mental health status and heart variability and their potential association during pregnancy.
Starting the first class of my PhD with Dr. Miriam Bender as a very outstanding thinker encouraged me to investigate the philosophical foundations of nursing. For me, it is crucial to make sure about the basement of a building before building it up. Dr. Bender is very supportive in guiding me in order to feed my interest in finding out the nursing and its ground through the literature review.
We reviewed 46 studies that were philosophical inquiry in identifying the way by which nursing goals can be achieved. The articles were from 2009 to 2020 to answer the question, “Why philosophy in nursing?”
What we found was an interesting tension between an acknowledgment through discourse about the complexity of the world, requiring aligned flexibility, diversity, and criticality regarding nursing ‘knowledge’ (with numerous ideations of the term), and a desire to create a nonflexible, unified ‘foundation’ for nursing that would serve as criteria for the articulation, codification, and standardization of nursing knowledge and practice.
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