Emancipatory knowing uncovers social and political issues, such as inequality, discrimination, and injustice, in order to motivate people to action. There are five nurses’ patterns of knowledge: empirics (scientific observation), ethics (moral component), personal knowing (relationships between the self and others), aesthetics (the art of nursing), and emancipatory knowing (Chinn & Kramer, 2018). According to Chinn and Kramer (2018), emancipatory knowing is a pattern that tries to explain how nurses act and what motivates them to make the marginalized voices heard. This pattern arises from the nurses’ reflection concerning patients’ diseases, leading to attempts to provide clients with a higher quality of their lives (Chinn & Kramer, 2018).
Interestingly enough, “emancipatory knowing seeks freedom from institutional and institutionalized social and political contexts that sustain advantage for some and disadvantage for others” (Chinn & Kramer, 2018, p. 6). Therefore, emancipatory knowing is a pattern that encourages nurses and other health practitioners to act according to patients’ interests, seeking to discover underlying causes of illnesses in the political and social backgrounds.
Applying this pattern to the advanced practice nursing role as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, one can claim that emancipatory knowledge helps health specialists improve their patients’ decision-making capabilities. In other words, emancipatory knowledge makes nurses act, targeting patients with mental disorders and avoiding paternalistic or stigmatizing attitudes towards them, improving their decision-making abilities. For instance, there is research conducted by Douglas (2021) revealed that decreasing the number of psychiatric beds in the USA leads to increased rates of homeless people, incarceration, and life expectancy. Therefore, psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners may consider insufficient financing of beds as a cause of their patients’ decreasing quality of life, making attempts to change the situation.
References
Chinn, P. L., & Kramer, M. K. (2018). Knowledge development in nursing: Theory and process. Elsevier.
Douglas, J. K. (2021). Evaluating the impact of federal mental health policy: An analysis of how federal deinstitutionalization impacted persons with severe mental illness. Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects, 25.