A response to 'Ontologies of nursing in an age of spiritual pluralism: closed or open worldview?' by Barbara Pesut: our review of the Central Unifying Focus perspective as implying an open worldview: a clarification.

摘要

We recently proposed a central unifying focus for the discipline of nursing from within the perspective of the human-natural world. The central focus is 'facilitating humanization, meaning, choice, quality of life, and healing in living and dying' (Willis et al, 2008, p. E28). Dr Pesut's discussion of our work as implying a 'closed worldview' was very helpful to us and caused us to re-examine our work for clarity as we had not intended for it to imply this. In particular, her worry is that 'definitions that confine humanization, quality of life, and health to the human-natural paradigm do not acknowledge the potential for interaction at the supernatural, thus ruling out a dimension of reality that many in society view as significant to their experiences of health and healing' (Pesut, 2010, pp. 15-23). Seen this way the human-natural worldview seems to represent a closed system. However, we do not think of it in such terms.