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The NUR 490 Module 1 example, in full
Twelve Years at the Door: A Personal Philosophy of Nursing From the Emergency Department
[Student Name]
Southern New Hampshire University
NUR 490: Transformational Capstone
Module One Philosophy of Nursing Paper
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.
Twelve Years at the Door: A Personal Philosophy of Nursing From the Emergency Department
Introduction
For twelve years I have worked in a busy community emergency department, where the door opens every few minutes on someone whose worst day has just begun. Emergency nursing can feel like a series of tasks performed at speed: triage, lines, medications, monitors, discharge instructions. Writing a philosophy of nursing forces me to say what those tasks are for and what I believe about the people I care for. This paper states my beliefs about the four central concepts of the discipline, person, health, environment and nursing, and describes how the RN to BSN program has changed them. My central belief is that nursing is the practice of noticing: seeing the person, the risk and the context that others in a hurry are likely to miss.
The Person
I believe every person who comes through the door is more than the reason for the visit. A woman brought in for a fall is also a caregiver worried about the husband she left at home, a man with chest pain is also a worker afraid of losing a day's wages, and a teenager with an overdose is also someone's child who may be deciding whether to keep living. Seeing the whole person does not slow emergency care; it changes it. When I ask the woman who fell who is caring for her husband tonight, I may prevent a second emergency.
This belief aligns with caring science, which describes nursing as a relationship in which the nurse attends to the person's wholeness and dignity rather than only to the disease (Watson, 2008). In a department where people are often reduced to a chief complaint and a bed number, protecting that wholeness is itself a nursing act.
Health
I believe health is not the absence of disease but a person's ability to live the life they value within the limits they face. Many of my patients will never be free of heart failure, diabetes or addiction. Health for them may mean understanding their medications well enough to stay out of the hospital, having a working phone for follow-up calls, or being treated with enough respect to come back before a crisis rather than after one. This view makes me attentive to social needs such as housing, food and transportation, because they often decide whether a discharge plan works.
Environment
I believe the environment includes both the physical setting and the systems around the patient, and that nurses are responsible for shaping both. In the emergency department, the environment includes hallway beds, noise, crowding and the handoffs between shifts, all of which affect safety. It also includes the community a patient returns to. A frail older man discharged at midnight to an empty house has left my care, but the environment I sent him into was shaped by decisions I helped make. Professional standards describe nursing as protecting and promoting health through attention to the settings in which people live and receive care (American Nurses Association, 2021), and that description fits emergency work closely.
Nursing
I believe nursing is the discipline of noticing and acting on what is noticed. In triage, it is recognizing that a quiet patient is more worrying than a loud one. At the bedside, it is seeing the subtle change in breathing an hour before a monitor alarms. In teaching, it is realizing from a patient's face that the discharge instructions made no sense. Nursing also means speaking up. Noticing a risk and staying silent about it is not nursing, and in a hierarchical, rushed environment, speaking up takes deliberate practice.
Values in Practice
Three values hold these beliefs together. The first is fairness. In a crowded department, the patients most likely to wait longest or be dismissed are those who are poor, unhoused, intoxicated or unable to speak English, and I try to notice when my own judgment is being shaped by those labels rather than by clinical need. The second is honesty. Patients deserve to know what is happening and how long they may wait, even when the answer is unwelcome, and colleagues deserve to hear when I am worried about a patient or a practice. The third is steadiness. Emergency nursing rewards speed, but my most important contribution is often calm: a steady voice for a frightened family, a clear plan in a chaotic resuscitation, or a pause to double-check a medication when everyone is rushing.
These values are tested every shift. On a night when twelve patients are boarding in hallways, fairness means reassessing the quiet patient in the corner rather than only responding to whoever calls loudest. Honesty means telling the charge nurse that I cannot safely take another critical patient. Steadiness means modeling the same careful practice for a new graduate that I would want if I were the patient.
Ways of Knowing
My philosophy draws on different kinds of knowledge. Carper (1978) identified four kinds of knowledge that nurses draw on: empirical knowledge from science, aesthetic knowledge expressed in the art of care, personal knowledge of oneself in relationship with the patient, and ethical knowledge of what ought to be done. For most of my career I relied on empirical and aesthetic knowing: protocols, skills and the instinct that comes from experience. The BSN program has pushed me to use empirical knowledge more deliberately, by appraising research rather than following habit, and to give more attention to ethical knowing, especially when decisions about crowding or early discharge place efficiency above patient welfare.
How the BSN Changed My Philosophy and What It Means for My Capstone
Before this program, I would have described nursing mainly as expert task performance under pressure. I now see those tasks as the visible part of a larger responsibility to notice risks at the level of the unit and the system, not only the patient. Courses in community health, quality and research taught me that the patterns I notice across many shifts, such as repeated returns of the same patients or routine practices without evidence, are also nursing concerns that I can act on.
This philosophy will guide my capstone change project. I intend to choose a problem I have noticed repeatedly in the emergency department and to bring evidence, colleagues and leaders together to change it. If nursing is the practice of noticing and acting, then the capstone is a chance to do both at a scale beyond a single patient.
References
American Nurses Association. (2021). Nursing: Scope and standards of practice (4th ed.). American Nurses Association.
Carper, B. A. (1978). Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, 1(1), 13-24. https://doi.org/10.1097/00012272-197810000-00004
Watson, J. (2008). Nursing: The philosophy and science of caring (Rev. ed.). University Press of Colorado.
How this NUR 490 Module 1 example is structured
A philosophy paper can drift into sentiment, so this one is anchored by the four concepts that nursing theory uses to define the discipline. After a short introduction, each concept gets its own section with a clear statement of belief and a concrete example from emergency practice that shows the belief in action. A section on ways of knowing explains how the writer uses different forms of nursing knowledge, drawing on a classic framework. The final section describes how the RN to BSN program changed the philosophy and how the philosophy will shape the capstone change project, which gives the paper a forward purpose.
Get NUR 490 Module 1 written to your instructions
Send the NUR 490 Module 1 instructions and rubric along with a few notes on your practice setting and values. The desk writes a philosophy paper to that prompt in 24 to 48 hours, and the first is free. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Southern New Hampshire University document.
NUR 490 Module 1 questions, answered
What does NUR 490 Module 1 usually ask for?
The capstone often opens by asking students to reflect on their professional identity, for example through a personal philosophy of nursing, and to connect it to the change project they will develop. Your classroom instructions state whether the philosophy is a standalone paper or part of the capstone and what elements it must include.
What is the nursing metaparadigm?
The metaparadigm is the set of four central concepts that nursing theories address: the person or client, health, the environment and nursing itself. Many philosophy assignments ask students to state their beliefs about each concept, which gives the paper structure and links it to nursing theory.
Should a philosophy of nursing include citations?
Usually yes, especially when you draw on nursing theory, ethics or professional standards. The beliefs are yours, but grounding them in recognized sources shows how your philosophy fits within the discipline. Examples from your own practice make the beliefs concrete.