Preface
The Art of Nursing: Humanizing Healthcare is an essential resource for pre-health human sciences students and pre-licensure nurses, including ADN and BSN nursing students. The impact of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and Skill of Involvement (SOI) are concepts in healthcare that are both beautiful and complex and deepen the nursing student’s knowledge early in practice in a meaningful way. Nursing students bring specific talents, traits, and life experiences to nursing. SOI and the student’s recognition of SDOH complement analysis in the assessment of the patient, family, and environment.
SOI in nursing refers to higher-order holistic cognitive processes including intuition, empathy, sensitivity, and cultural humility that are recognized as holistic cognitive skills that can be measured and improved in nursing students (Benner et al., 2009). SOI enhances clinical decision-making and improves the delivery of person-centered care in all healthcare settings. Nurses utilizing SOI are needed now more than ever in a mechanized healthcare system that requires nursing to address healthcare equity by recognizing the impact of social determinants of health in diverse populations.
The Future of Nursing 2020-2030 identifies three core nursing competencies to be addressed by nursing education surrounding SDOH (National Academies of Sciences [NASEM], 2021). First, the ability of nurses to be aware of implicit bias in the delivery of person-centered care with “empathy and humility” (NASEM, 2021, p. 205). Second, the ability to collaborate and provide care that addresses SDOH “is necessarily a multisectoral endeavor” and includes many issues such as “housing, education, justice, and the environment” that require working with an interdisciplinary team (NASEM, 2021, p. 205). Third, the ability to adapt practice that uses technology without “exacerbating existing disparities and inequities” (NASEM, 2021, p. 205).
The increasingly technological environment in nursing has created a gap where the caring relationship between nurses and patients may suffer (Honkavuo & Abo, 2020). Nurse educators more than ever are responsible for providing presence, dialogue, intuition, creativity, and human interaction to students both in the classroom and online (Honkavuo & Abo, 2020). Consequently, these are the behaviors, qualities, traits, and cognitive skills that nurse educators would like to see in healthcare settings between students and patients. According to Benner et al. (2009), SOI is largely excluded currently in nursing education. There is a lack of language for SOI and a skilled social body of knowledge (Benner et al., 2009).
The American Association of Colleges (AACN) (2021) Essentials report speaks to clinical judgment, communication, compassionate care, diversity, ethics, evidence-based practice, health policy, and health equity as interwoven concepts across all of the nursing competency domains and are key elements required for nurses entering professional practice (AACN, 2021). Sub-competencies for entry-level professional nursing education within the domains point to SOI, such as ways of knowing (intuition), empathy, sensitivity and cultural humility, and individualized person-centered care in diverse populations delivered holistically with the intentional presence of the nurse (AACN, 2021).
The Art of Nursing: Humanizing Healthcare proposes a vernacular for novice nurses early in practice to bring salience and a voice to the SDOH and SOI into their nursing practice.
American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). (2021). The Essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/42/AcademicNursing/pdf/Essentials 2001.pdf
Benner, P., Tanner, C., & Chesla, C. (2009). Expertise in Nursing Practice: Caring, clinical judgment, and ethics. Springer.
Honkavuo, L., & Åbo, R. (2020). Digital Teaching in Nursing Education: A Quantitative Study on Nursing Students’ Views. International Journal of Caring Sciences, 13(2), 2–837. www.internationaljournalofcaringsciences.org
