Pragmatic Children’s Nursing ¹

Nurses often like to think that they just do nursing, that one intuitively knows how to nurse and that theory, education and lifelong learning are unnecessary complications. However, at the same time, nurses use ideas such as activities of daily living, or self-care needs to organise their work. These ideas come from nurse theorist (Roper et al and Orem respectively).

In children’s nursing the idea used to organise our work has been family-centred care. Smith and Coleman (2010) agree that this is more of an approach than a theory of nursing. While it has been a useful concept in advocating for parental access and to some extent children’s rights in hospital, successive studies have not been able to show that nurses follow this approach nor that there are definable outcomes ^2,3

Pragmatic Children’s Nursing is a new theory designed for children. It is the first attempt to design a nursing theory just for children, not to simply adapt an adult theory. As the name suggests, it uses the concepts and ideas of North American Pragmatists to suggest that there is not a single one-size-fits-all way to do children’s nursing, but many ways that suit a time, place and cultural space.

This website is here to allow a space for people to discuss the ideas, and practices described in and suggested by Pragmatic Children’s Nursing ¹