In my last editorial (10.12968/vetn.2022.13.7.291) I spoke about our use of the term nurse and how our professional evolution depends on many things, not least learning from our human nursing colleagues. There is no doubt that the role of the human nursing professional evolved immensely when academics and researchers began to study what it meant to think like a nurse, how this thinking impacted patients, and how the nursing process impacts the broader healthcare sector.
Nursing theory began in the hands of nursing scholars, defining what it means to think and act like a nurse. With this assertion, the profession of nursing set itself apart from every other role in the healthcare team. The identity of nursing pivoted into that of a true professional, making it clear that nurses were not competing with physicians, nor were they simply carrying out health and hygiene tasks, they were thinking. They were reasoning. They were making clinical decisions that were no less important than those made by physicians. They were carving out a niche for themselves as essential members of the healthcare team.
Nursing scholars are still studying and researching their profession, and out of this work leaders, educational standards, professional standards, and an immensely strong sense of professional identity has emerged. If you walk down the street and ask anyone you meet if they know what a nurse is, the chances are very good that they will say yes, and they will be able to describe the caring tasks, strength and identity that we have come to know about nurses. Could we say the same about veterinary nurses?
Work has started on the development of theories of veterinary nursing. It was a watershed moment in 2007 when Hilary Orpet and Andrea Jeffery published the ability model (later updated; Orpet and Jeffery, 2010), a veterinary nursing model that would shape our perspectives about the nursing process. Since then, our awareness of the nursing process has increased, although we still seem to lack understanding about what an evolving veterinary nursing process means for our patients, our profession and our sector.
In human nursing, hundreds of nursing theories and models have been published in the last hundred years, but understanding of the nursing process is ever-evolving, with clinical reasoning taking centre stage (Levett-Jones et al, 2017). The focus has pivoted to developing critical thinking skills and, taking a holistic approach, this has turned toward the profession itself as awareness builds about how scholarship can bridge the gap between theory and practice.
We have come so far from Orpet and Jeffery's first model, and publishing more nursing theories and models would be immensely valuable to explore the contexts in which we nurse. However, an increasingly important opportunity is revealing itself – evaluating how we think, how we teach students how to think like a nurse, and how we apply this thinking toward achieving improvements in clinical effectiveness. These clinical reasoning skills are the skills of nursing. These are what set us apart, supporting us to make hundreds of clinical decisions every day in practice. These are the skills that will pave the way for our professional evolution.
We hope you enjoy this issue.