Back to basics: exploring the conceptual basis of nursing

It has long been recognized that nursing is essentially a practice-based discipline, underpinned by fundamental concepts which inform practice. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to discuss the need for an exploration of these concepts of nursing as a foundation to pre-registration nursing programmes. Second, by utilizing a continuous quality improvement perspective, an evaluation of teachers’ experiences with a cohort of adult and child health branch students is considered. It is concluded that a significant proportion of students found that a raised conceptual awareness served to promote theory–practice links.