You can’t know what concepts mean to nurses these days if you have no idea what they are in general. Concepts are thoughts or ideas and they are part of everyone’s daily activities. They are as important to your life as it is to breathe. Concepts or ideas are a part of everyone’s experience and readily available to everyone alike. The manner in which you conceptualize the concepts that come your way makes all the difference.
Conceptualization and how it works
The conceptualization of an idea implies a previous visualization or examination of that very idea, followed next by the thinking process. Each person has their own specific way of conceptualizing an idea. Sets of rules and all kinds of books have been written on how to conceptualize an idea, and on when is the best time or what is the best manner for it to be put into action. The moment we start thinking about a concept, it immediately becomes part of our own individual cognitive processes. Concepts cannot survive on their own. Nor can they be used as single units. In both instances, other concepts are needed.
From an origin point of view, there are two types of concepts: those issued by your own mind, and those issued by other people’s minds. It takes one concept to explain another. For instance, if you were to explain sitting in a chair you would use the concept first there is a chair, then it is necessary to stand in front of the chair, then the concept is to bend at the knees, etc. One concept builds on another and explains the idea.
Concepts are put on auto-pilot:
The greater part of the conceptualization that one person does in a day’s time, is mechanical. That means most of the time we aren’t even aware that we are conceptualizing thoughts and ideas. In everyday activities you just don’t spend time thinking about concepts and then go through a deliberate analysis process. If you want to lie in bed, you don’t start analyzing, you just do it. There are a lots of concepts you will be conceptualizing and actively analyzing when walking in the street, such as cars rushing by, street-crossing, people bumping into you, but not the action of walking itself.
It has become a custom for society to attach a label to everything in life, be it an actual thing, a situation, or a person. This being said, you’ll soon realize how particular concepts have given way to more generic ones. If you take the concept of “family”, for example, you won’t process it as the mother and the father and the children and grandparents. It will be just plain “family”. We see sunsets not as a sun going down at dusk, a sky, a red color but merely as sunsets. The greater part of the concepts in use today is issued by society and ruled as standard. Concepts are something we have heard of, learned of it or seen it at some point in our experience and they become part of our thinking processes. However, we should not mistake these ideas we have assimilated and turned into mechanical concepts, for original ideas.
So how does this apply to nursing?
In their training, nurses must be taught not only the workings of the human body, but of the human mind as well, focusing on the critical thinking and its value. It is imperative for a nurse to develop this most useful and necessary ability and hone it with a constant flow of information and practice. Therefore, in order to easily conceptualize the concepts received daily while working with patients, nurses must learn to control and direct their conceptualization. Nurses need to be able to take concepts and process them in terms considered “outside of the box”. If they have not trained their mind to perform the process of critical thinking they become too single-minded and miss alternative solutions that just might be the best answer for their patient’s well being.
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