Assessment of educational effectiveness of applying Nightingale's concept of "disease" to promote the reflection of life style of nursing students

Abstract

<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> This study is to assess the educational effectiveness of applying Nightingale's concept of "Disease" to promote the reflection of life styles of nursing students. Nightingale descripted disease as, "a reparative process." She went on to say, "The reparative process which Nature has instituted, and which we call disease, has been hindered by some want of knowledge or attention, in one or in all of these things and pain, suffering, or interruption of the whole process sets in". According to the above concept we can find one very important principle hidden in Nightingale's thinking. That is, if we know what living processes causes people to become ill, we can help them to arrange their life style to prevent recurrences or onset of the illness.</p> <p><strong>Methods:</strong> The subject of "Medical and Nursing Information" was organized the concept into lectures to instruct nursing students how to apply the concept to reflect the relations between their life styles namely their continued 24 hours lives and health conditions. 102 nursing students who attended the lectures were enrolled for assessing the educational effectiveness. After the lectures students keyed in their fundamental daily living information using the software which developed based on the Nightingale's concept of "Disease" and minimal period two weeks of their daily lives as time of sleeping, contents of meals and exercises, schedules etc. and their health conditions. Researchers analyzed the data with 4 ranks of criterions.</p> <p><strong>Results and conclusions:</strong> We found that 98% of students could identified the relations between their life styles and their health conditions, 69% of students could make concrete plans for changing the patterns of daily lives to improve the health conditions. Nightingale's concept of "Disease" is useful to promote students' reflection and it is also could be recognized as the nursing strategy of preventive medicine.</p>