title: Knowledge and practice development: toward an ontology of nursing.
abstract: This paper argues that patterns and dependencies in the way that modern nursing has been constructed have contributed to a lack of clarity about the significance of nursing's ontological dimensions. It is claimed that there is now a crisis in development of nursing knowledge and practice. The solution to this crisis lies in nurses explaining what they do, not just in relation to the epistemological dimensions that methods of positivist science allow, but also from ontological dimensions.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Retsas
mesh_terms: D004506:Education, Nursing; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D016294:Models, Nursing; D009726:Nurses / Q000523:psychology*; D015399:Nursing Research / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends