Towards a nursing science of the unique

Abstract

In this paper we attempt to counter the tendency for reflection and reflective practice to be marginalised by the growing dominance of evidence-based practice in nursing. We resist the assimilation of reflection into a hierarchy of evidence dominated by the findings from ‘hard science’, and argue instead for an alternative science of nursing based on the premise that nursing is a series of individual and unique encounters which cannot be described by a science of large numbers. The resulting ‘science of the unique’ is concerned with persons rather than people, with wet data from the clinical setting rather than dry data from the laboratory and clinical trial, and with the individual practice encounter as the site of reflexive research. In particular, we argue that the traditional concept of evidence from formal research is merely the starting point for the on-the-spot generation of reflective/reflexive evidence by nurses themselves as part of everyday practice.