Introduction
Nursing students are experiencing firsthand many issues surrounding poverty, social justice, and health equity that nursing education is struggling to address in the curriculum. The SDOH and SOI in all practice areas are about connection to patients. Relating to patients in a way that the caring aspect is predominant is key to providing patient-centered care. Benner (2022) describes the importance of the delivery of this SOI with ethical comportment. Ways of knowing through personal experience are available to all of us, including providers, faculty, and novice-level students. The caring aspect of using cognitive skills of involvement and relating to the social determinants of health from personal experience and transferring that lived experience to the care provided to patients is available to the novice nurse in early practice. Students need a vernacular to be able to discuss and reflect on aspects of SDOH and SOI in a personal way that will transfer to the care being provided to patients.
The Art of Nursing: Humanizing Healthcare assists nursing students in identifying relationships on the impact of SDOH and SOI including type of intuition, interpersonal reactivity (empathy), sensitivity, and cultural humility. According to Price et al. (2017), “holistic, intuitive reasoning processes may be particularly valuable in the often complex and distracting environment of clinical care” (p. 1149). Nursing education that includes diversity, SDOH, cultural humility, and concepts of health equity will better prepare new graduates to provide person-centered care with improved clinical decision-making. These concepts can be “integrated and sustained throughout nursing school curricula and paired with community-based experiential opportunities whereby students can apply their knowledge, build their skills, and reflect on their experiences” (NASEM, 2021, p. 232).
Lastly, When nursing solely relies on critical rationality and analysis, the whole person is overlooked, and clinical decision-making requires looking at the nurses’ relation to attachment to outcome, specifically the “responsibility for the impact on the person(s), and situation(s) involved” (Benner, 2022, p. 3). Ways of knowing and human experience are essential to providing patient-centered care that considers the SDOH. Shared backgrounds, culture, and events increase concordance in healthcare. Intuition, empathy, sensitivity, and cultural humility are features/holistic cognitive skills that complement the science of nursing and are required to discern meaningfulness in nurse-patient interactions that prevent failure to rescue (Benner, 2022).
Benner, P. (2022). Overcoming Descartes’ representational view of the mind in nursing pedagogies, curricula, and testing. https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12411
National Academies of Sciences, E., & Medicine (NASEM). (2021). The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve health Equity. (M. K. Wakefield, D. R. Williams, S. Le Menestrel, & J. L. Flaubert, Eds.). National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25982
Price, A., Zulkosky, K., White, K., & Pretz, J. (2017). Accuracy of intuition in clinical decision-making among novice clinicians. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 73(5), 1147-1157. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27862180/
