Relationship between Theory, Research and Practice

Relationship between Theory, Research and Practice

Theory, research, and practice in nursing have an interlinked relationship, with each relying on the other to inform and make the nursing profession better. An interlink between theory, research, and practice brings up a true integration of knowledge gained from vast sources and experiences and is designed to support services to clients and improve society’s health (Whitehead & Hutton, 2020). In the nursing profession, the practice involves the actual implementation of knowledge obtained while studying, which means the application of theories and conducting more research to keep on improving the quality of care. Every day is a learning opportunity, and with the nurses being exposed to new challenges every now and then, they need to come up with possible solutions that will effectively and efficiently help in their continuum of care. Based on this, a nurse must dig deeper into research, conducting their own research and consulting with researchers on the same field to amass as much knowledge that will enable them to get a solution to the problem.

Conducting research is not a blind mission but involves a series of presenting challenges that need to be tackled, removing the stumbling block to ensuring nursing success in the provision of care. This means that nurses need to be in practice to encounter these problems, some of which might have ready solutions, but others require more research to reach a conclusion. When a problem has no immediate solution, it doesn’t mean it will forever remain that way, as nurses must keep trying new things to improve patient care. Due to the need to obtain solutions to difficult challenges, nurses develop theories on how the specific problem needs to be addressed; theories need to be further researched with the postulated hypothesis tested (Black, 2019). As a result, nurses will be required to conduct extensive research to see whether their postulated theories can work, upon which, after testing, they will be required to integrate their theory and research into practice. Based on this, theory, research, and practice are interlinked in that practice involves testing theories that have been found helpful for practice to survive and evolve.

References

Black, B. P. (2019). The science of nursing and evidence-based practice. Professional Nursing E-Book: Concepts & Challenges, 217.

Whitehead, D., & Hutton, A. (2020). Identifying research ideas, questions, statements and hypotheses. Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence Based Practice, 81.