Title: Nursing Theories and the Practice of Nursing
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Content: They serve to guide assessment, intervention, and evaluation of nursing care. They provide a rationale for collecting reliable and valid data about the health status of clients, which are essential for effective decision making and implementation. They help to establish criteria to measure the quality of nursing care. They help build a common nursing terminology to use in communicating with other health professionals. Finally, nursing theories enhance the autonomy of nursing by defining its own independent functions. In nursing education, nursing theories provide a general focus for curriculum design. They guide the curricular decision making. In nursing research, nursing theories offer a framework for generating knowledge and new ideas. They assist in discovering knowledge gaps in the specific field of study. Finally, they offer a systematic approach to identify questions for study, select variables, interpret findings, and validate nursing interventions.