subject: The Importance Of Concepts In Today's Nursing [print this page] You can't know what concepts mean to nurses these days if you have no idea what they are in general. If you want to define concepts, you can define them as thoughts or ideas. They are an inherent part of your life, not to mention a most significant one. There is not one person on this planet who can say they have no experience of concepts, since they are so easily accessible. However, people don't all have the same concepts. Each person has a different way of conceptualizing their thoughts or the ideas they receive from outside sources or influences.
Conceptualization and how it works
In order to conceptualize a concept or idea you must imagine it or observe it. Once this happens then the thinking process begins. How each person conceptualizes an idea or concept is personal. There are manuals or rules on how to conceptualize an idea or how or when to put that concept into action. The moment we start thinking about a concept, it immediately becomes part of our own individual cognitive processes. Concepts cannot survive on their own. Nor can they be used as single units. In both instances, other concepts are needed.
From an origin point of view, there are two types of concepts: those issued by your own mind, and those issued by other people's minds. Even to explain a concept, you need the help of other concepts. If, for example, you want to explain the concept of lying in bed, you need to use the concept of "there is a bed", to which you add "the horizontal position of the body", which sums up to "the body on the bed in a horizontal position". So you see, several concepts added logically can sum up to explain a concept.
Automatic concepts
Most of the conceptualization that we do during the course of the day is so automatic that we are not really aware that we are conceptualizing a concept. Just imagine what it would be like if for every single action comprised in your daily routine, you took the time to enumerate and analyze all the concepts involved in those actions. Whenever you are walking in the street, do you stop to think about it? Of course, you will probably think about why you're lying in bed, or for how long, but the actual lying in bed does not require an active analytical process.
It has become a custom for society to attach a label to everything in life, be it an actual thing, a situation, or a person. Because of this, we see less in specifics and more in terms of overall concepts. Just take the word "friends," for instance. You don't see it as this friend, added to this friend, added to the other friend. You will only think the general concept "friends". Sunny days are just that, sunny days. They're no longer "sun shining bright" and "blue cloudless skies." Most concepts are those that society has dictated as norm. Concepts are something we have heard of, learned of it or seen it at some point in our experience and they become part of our thinking processes. These automatic concepts are then learned and accepted ideas but not original ideas.
How do conceptualization and nursing mix? The nursing education must extend its focus to the human mind as well, with an emphasis on the processes involved in critical thinking, a fact that will benefit the future nurse in coping with her work. A process that takes a lot of knowledge and training to develop, critical thinking is one of the most significant abilities a nurse should possess. The ability to conceptualize the constant flow of information that comes with nursing work, is vital and needs to be mastered. It is essential for nurses to be able to process the concepts they meet with in terms that go against the norm. If critical thinking is a quality they lack, nurses may become short-sighted when it comes to finding different solutions to their patient's problems, thus not being able to provide the best care or sometimes even endangering the patient.
