You can’t know what concepts mean to nurses these days if you have no idea what they are in general. When you say concept, you actually say thought, or idea. It comes almost as natural as breathing and you deal with it on a daily basis in everything you do. There is not one person on this planet who can say they have no experience of concepts, since they are so easily accessible. However, people don’t all have the same concepts. Each person has a different way of conceptualizing their thoughts or the ideas they receive from outside sources or influences.
What does it mean to conceptualize?
You can’t really conceptualize an idea without visualizing or noticing it first; only after you have gone through this, can the thinking process begin. 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. When we begin to think about a concept it is then integrated into our reasoning processes. Our own individual reasoning processes. Concepts cannot survive on their own. Nor can they be used as single units. In both instances, other concepts are needed.
Concepts can be either your own personal thoughts or ideas, or they can come from outside sources, meaning other brains. You can’t explain a concept without making use of other concepts. If, for example, you want to explain the concept of lying in bed, you need to use the concept of “there is a bed”, to which you add “the horizontal position of the body”, which sums up to “the body on the bed in a horizontal position”. So you see, several concepts added logically can sum up to explain a concept.
Everyday routine concepts
Normally, most of the conceptualization is done unconsciously, in the sense that we are aware of only a small amount of concepts at the time we are doing the conceptualization. Just imagine what it would be like if for every single action comprised in your daily routine, you took the time to enumerate and analyze all the concepts involved in those actions. 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.
People have a tendency to put a tag on every life experience. Because of this, we see less in specifics and more in terms of overall concepts. For instance, we see the word people not as this person plus this person plus this person but merely as people. We see sunsets not as a sun going down at dusk, a sky, a red color but merely as sunsets. The majority of the concepts we use were imposed on us by society. Every day we meet and experience concepts and make them a part of our reasoning processes. It is a practice that started the moment we became aware of the world around us and that has been going on ever since. These automatic concepts are then learned and accepted ideas but not original ideas.
So how does this apply to nursing?
Nursing students have to be taught about the process of critical thinking and how the human mind works and how much power there is in critical or analytical thinking. 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. There are times when nurses are faced with concepts that they need to process in non-conventional terms. If critical thinking is a quality they lack, nurses may become short-sighted when it comes to finding different solutions to their patient’s problems, thus not being able to provide the best care or sometimes even endangering the patient.
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