Discuss in a 2 page paper, the concept of stewardship and how it relates to the field of advanced practice nursing. This should also incorporate your faith, as this is part of the faith integration for this course.

It is difficult to define the concept of nursing (Elgie, 2007). Nursing is not about giving medical care to the patients who are admitted in the hospitals but an amalgamation of both medical and metal care for faster recovery of the patients. The three-core pillar of nursing profession is caring, effective planning and compassion. Nursing, a nebulous profession may serve to define it paradoxically as an adaptive mode of care. It is artful, intuitive and holistic profession (Elgie, 2007). Nursing can also be defined is a kind of stewardship. Like the process of land stewardship, the logger choose trees for cutting in such a definite manner that it is good for the greenery in the forest. If that logger just simply chops down the tree for the sake of work, then what will follow is deforestation (Elgie, 2007). Similarly in nursing care, nurses just might not provide simple medical care for the sake of completion of duty, they must think, relate and feel for the patients and only then, they can support them mentally and thereby assist in speedy recovery.

There exists certain gender biasness in nursing profession. Whenever, the term nursing is pronounced, the first image, which comes into mind, is a woman, dress in white cap and socks. However, there must not remain gender discrimination in the nursing profession like a use of separate designation called male-nurse. The profession of nursing is as noble as the profession of physician. Nursing can never be considered as the second best profession, coming after the doctors. However, initially nurses are referred to as midwives or an 'woman assisting". So, the concept of male nurse cannot be regarded as a contradictory term but the role of husbandry should be treated as a companion to the midwives. Male nurse are like a different gender version of nurse like male midwife or mid-husband (MacWilliams, Schmidt & Bleich, 2013). Like in animal care, animal husbandry means caring of animals and hence relating to the concept to stewardship. There lies a seamless relationship between the husbandry and wifery and the collation of both delivers a dedicated nursing care to the patient. Nursing is a wonderful art of balancing both husbandry and wifery for the stewardship of health.

In nursing, the stewardship of health is the proper application of hard skills and soft skills (Elgie, 2007). Via hard skills, nurses deliver quality care to the patient like giving them intravenous injection at the time of medical urgency and via the application of soft skills, the nurses communicate with the patients, counsel them and help them towards informed decision making (Windsor, Douglas & Harvey, 2012).  In nursing, husbandry provides container-like influence and on the other hand, wifery nurtures that influence within the container. Here both the gender can perform the both the roles or can effectively complement each other for the betterment of health of the patients (MacWilliams, Schmidt & Bleich, 2013).

So, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that the concept of stewardship is effectively related to the advanced nursing practice. In advanced nursing practice, male or the female nurses should never be discriminated in term of gender, as it will hamper the stewardship of nursing practice. Men or women, whoever is reenrolled under the nursing profession must respect the responsibility of the nursing cap and work accordingly either via co-ordination with each other or via dedicated care to promote fast recovery of the patients, both mentally and physically.

References

Elgie, R. (2007). Nursing and the Art of Stewardship. Medsurg Nursing, 16(5), 344.

MacWilliams, B. R., Schmidt, B., & Bleich, M. R. (2013). Men in nursing. AJN The American Journal of Nursing, 113(1), 38-44.

Windsor, C., Douglas, C., & Harvey, T. (2012). Nursing and competencies—a natural fit: the politics of skill/competency formation in nursing. Nursing inquiry, 19(3), 213-222.