Nurses are active participants on the interdisciplinary health care team. Within a variety of roles and in multiple settings, nurses assess wellness and health needs and risks of culturally diverse people throughout the life span. Nursing is a vital force in society whose roles affect and are affected by the current and emerging systems for health care delivery. Knowledge derived from research, and other scholarly activities, practice, and societal trends provides direction to the evolving practice of nursing. Nurses provide holistic care for people who are understood to be unique, complex, culturally diverse and interactive within a dynamic environment.
People meet their own needs of varying complexity when possible.
Health, a dynamic process, occurs in degrees of wellness and illness from optimal health to death. Health goals are best achieved through a client-centered, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, integrated and accessible health care delivery system. Such systems are influenced by social, economic, ethical, legal, and political components. As members of a therapeutic and caring discipline, nurses promote high quality health care and the improvement of health care delivery. Learning is a continuous, lifelong process building on previous levels of knowledge and experience and is influenced by time, maturation, and differing interests and abilities.