Florence Nightingale Research Paper

Hospitals nowadays are sterile looking. The nurses and doctors take their jobs seriously and clean almost everything for the harm of bacteria and germs. Though, hospitals weren't always like this. Hospitals used to be makeshift, in tents or homes and overcrowded, both of patients and disease. It was a wonder how they could even be called hospitals sometimes. But one woman changed the very way hospitals were run. She brought about cleanliness and structure to the well-being of both nurses and patients alike, and her name is Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale was a very important female nurse who made a big impact on the health, safety, and hygiene of hospitals worldwide. Florence Nightingale was a very smart woman and to start to see

Because when she was 16, Florence Nightingale believed she had a calling from God to reduce human suffering and she believed that nursing was the suitable career to do so (Selanders). But since people of Nightingale’s social stature viewed jobs as a lowly menial labor her parents refused it from her. When she was 17, she turned down a marriage proposal and explained that her “active nature...required satisfaction” (Biography.com Editors). With Nightingale’s persistence, her parents dropped their arguments and let Nightingale enroll at the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserswerth, Germany for two weeks of training in July 1850 and again for three months in July 1851. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses. In 1853, through social connections, she became the superintendent at the Institution for Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances, in London

She put her brains to work and a pen to the paper and began some of her most important work yet. Florence Nightingale wrote her environmental theory in 1860, which she published in her book Notes on Nursing: What it is, What is not, which states that the external conditions and forces of an organism can help it live or die (Shah). The role of nurses in this theory is to alter the patient’s environment to affect change in their health. Factors that’ll affect health are fresh air, clean water, sufficient food supplies, a good disposal system, the cleanliness of the patient and environment, and light (particularly direct sunlight). If any are failing or not there it may diminish the patient’s health (“Environmental Theory”). It focuses on the care of the patient, not the nursing process. The theory also focuses on the relationship between patient and nurse, which also means it must be adapted to fit the needs of individual patients. Everyone has different unique circumstances to the environmental theory that must be taken into account that best cares for the patient and their needs (“Environmental Theory”). She was the first to suggest that nurses be specifically educated and trained for their positions in healthcare. This allowed there to be standards of care in the field of nursing, which helped improve the overall care of