Back to basics: exploring the conceptual basis of nursing

It has long been recognized that nursing is essentially a practice-based di scipline, underpinned by fundamental concepts which inform practice. The pu rpose of this paper is two-fold: first to discuss the need for an explorati on of these concepts of nursing as a foundation to preregistration nursing programmes. Second, by utilizing a continuous quality improvement perspecti ve, an evaluation of teachers' experiences with a cohort of adult and child health branch students is considered. It is concluded that a significant p roportion of students found that a raised conceptual awareness served to pr omote theory-practice links. (C) 1999 Harcourt Publishers Ltd.