Nurses are trained to improve clients’ self-concept and improve their self-esteem, but what if the nurse is the one person who has not established his or her own self-concept? Little is generally known about this, since most of the medical professionals would focus much more on patient care.
Self-concept is an umbrella term which represents the total beliefs about three interrelated dimensions of the self: body image, self-esteem and personal identity. (Boyd, 2002). According to Burns (1986), self-concept is a set of attitudes a person holds towards himself. It governs all aspects of one’s behavior because the way someone feels about and evaluate aspects of themselves influence how the person operates in any situation. Therefore, self-concept generally refers to how a person thinks and presumes about oneself. The comprehensive definition of self-concept is a complex, dynamic system of how a person perceives himself in the context of one’s body image, self-esteem, and personal identity based on the learned beliefs, attitudes and opinions that he holds true about himself at a given point of time. (Theodore, 2014) In this study, the researchers will be focusing on self-concept of nurses not by their …show more content…
A positive connection with the patient as a result of health self-concept enhances nursing care (Heifner 1993, Olsen 1995), whereas a negative connection can bring about many disadvantages both for the nurse and patient. Olsen (1995) found that when nurses with low self-concept gave care, patients have been found to experience more distress in the forms of depression, anxiety and anger. Arthur (1992) argues that a well-developed professional self-concept aids in the delivery of responsible and accountable nursing care, and at the same time, increases and boosts a nurse’s self-concept. That has also been observed in the clinical