Holistic Care and Family Nurse Practitioners

Most nurses enter this profession because they want to care for people. Monitoring patients as they heal and seeing them return to living a quality life are perhaps the most common motivating factors behind why nurses do what they do. The common motivation shared among nurses today can be traced as far back to pioneer Florence Nightingale’s bedside days.

Nurses have been working to meet not just physical, but also the mental, emotional, spiritual and environmental needs of the patients they care for — taking notice of how each of these factors must be in balance for proper health and healing. This approach, known as holistic nursing, looks beyond a person’s physical disease to all aspects of health. Health is about more than just the absence of disease, and as more Family Nurse Practitioners (FNPs) take on the role of primary care provider, it is especially important that they are prepared to assess and manage a variety of influencing factors.

Increased access to distance learning will help more nurse practitioners enter the health care field over the next decade, and the demand for NPs is expected to jump 94 percent by 2025 thanks to shifting U.S. health policies. Despite some opposition from physicians, nurse practitioners are the cost-effective face of primary care for patients across the country — particularly in underserved areas like inner cities or extremely rural regions — and they continue to provide quality patient care when compared to primary care physicians.

Because the Family Nurse Practitioner is taking on a more independent role, it is critical that they be prepared to identify factors that may influence patient health. Because nurses are taught to implement “nursing interventions” — those actions that do not require a physician’s order — in the earliest days of nursing school, it is a familiar approach for FNPs to follow in their own practice. Incorporating approaches like deep breathing and guided imagery in conjunction with pain medication is one example. FNPs may also be more prepared to educate and evaluate the success of teaching programs to help patients improve or modify lifestyle risk factors.

In order to provide quality holistic care, FNPs need adequate exposure to a variety of health-related disciplines. In the Nursing@Simmons program, experts from multiple disciplines teach students. In addition to outstanding nursing instruction, students will glean experience from dieticians, mental health specialists, physical therapists and other professionals to gain the well-rounded exposure necessary to treat the whole person.

The ability to think independently and look beyond lab results or physical exams to gain an understanding of the deeper needs of the patient is a fundamental component of better medical care in the United States, and nurse practitioners who apply this holistic approach in their own practice are sure to see improved patient outcomes.