Orem explained, “I and my colleagues recognized and sought to understand the complexity of nursing. We found as our work progressed that a definitive definition and an expressed general theory of nursing were the intellectual instruments that were helpful for recognizing and dealing with the realities of nursing and its complexity in the world of nurses and their patients” (2011, p. 37). In doing so they created a complex theory that is broken down into three parts: self-care, self-care deficit, nursing systems. Self-care is the individual’s ability to care for self, which includes maintaining life, health, development and well-being. When an individual is unable to meet those needs, a deficit occurs.
This concept is the central focus of her Grand theory. She describes self-care deficit as the relationship between the person’s ability to perform self-care and the demand in which self-care agency is not sufficient to meet one’s self-care demands (Nursing Theories. Dorothy Orem 's Self-Care Theory, 2012). The concept of self-care deficit is expressed when nursing is needed and how people can be helped by nursing. Through the various methods of nursing, nurses are able to meet the person’s self-care needs.
Clinical supervision is basically described as a complex activity with multi-faceted functions that seeks to provide emotional support to counselors receiving supervision and providing them with extra education. This concept can also be described as a means of evaluating and monitoring counselors’ professional performance and enhancing the quality of their respective duties. In the nursing field, clinical supervision primarily focuses on enhancing nursing practice, enhancing the responsibility of nurse practitioners, and improving patient care Bush, 2005, p.36). This concept should seek to address several challenges that emerge from the feelings of loneliness that nurses experience in the modern nursing environment as they work towards abiding by standards and charters. This results in feelings of hopelessness, which is likely to have considerable effects on the nurse-patient relationship.
Effective patient-provider communication is an essential component of patient care, and for communication to be effective the information must be completed, accurate, timely, unambiguous, and understood by the patient (Patak et al., 2009). Effective communication between nurses and patients require some very important skills from nurses. Nurses need to make sure that patients truly understand what using simple, common words and avoiding medical terminologies are saying. “Nurses need to recognize and acknowledge the emotional burden and individual concerns of the patients. Contributing factors that perpetuate ineffective patient-provider communication include the lack of a systematic method for nursing assessment, evaluation, and monitoring of patient-provider communication needs and interventions and a lack of standardized training of healthcare providers” (Patak, 2009, p. 372).
This assignment will focus on the issue of Risk Assessment with relation to falls in the home in the elderly population. It will discuss the relationship between the community healthcare team and the individual client, the government policies related to the topic, and the influences of health policy upon the provision of community care. The role of the community nurse in public health education and promotion will also be explored. The client, in this particular instance, is Mrs Pugh. She is an 84-year-old female who lives alone since her husband's death 3 years ago.
The idea of spending our retirement in a nursing home is perceived by our society as the most undesirable of options. Three out of one hundred Americans over the age of 65 suffer from depression (National Institute of Mental Health, 2000). A study done at the University of Rhode Island reported that 11% of the residents in the nursing homes examined were suffering from depression (Brown, Lapane, & Luisi, 2002). Another study done at Columbia University reported that 44.2% of the nursing home residents tested showed some symptom of depression with 14.4% of the residents experiencing serious depression (Teresi, Abrams, Holmes, Ramirez, & Eimicke, 2001). Why is the depression rate among the elderly almost four times greater among those living in nursing homes?
I have soon come to realize how much more there is to nursing than just helping and healing. Nursing is not taking care of individuals it is caring for them. Caring is not only important when concerning nurse and patient relationships. It is important in every aspect of humanity. The culture of caring involves intervening programs that help to build caring behaviors among nurses.
Nursing Shortage in the U.S. West (2012) stated that currently, nurse staffing is defined in many ways- as the “presence” of staff, as total nursing care hours per patient per day, or as nurses’ expertise level or educational level (p. 24). These three factors strongly impact the way a patient is cared for. Without enough nurses there are not enough to go around to each patient and spend enough time caring for them. Hospital nurse are often forced to work short staffed, providing care in environments that place patients and even nurses themselves at risk (West, 2012, p. 24). Nurses with a lower education sometimes cannot provide the best care to patients due to the fact that they are not at that skill level.
This could result in fatal consequences for the patients, and the nurse might end up losing her license or can be suspended. Theresa Brown, a staff RN for five years, said “Mistakes are more likely once people have worked beyond a certain number of hours. That’s just a terrible, bad practice that, again, could be stopped if hospitals just had a large enough [available staff].”( Tuten,
The recent national nurse shortage has resulted in higher nurse workloads; fewer support resources, greater nursing dissatisfaction, and burnout, making it more difficult to provide optimal patient care (Upenieks, 2003). The primary role of nursing is to provide the best possible care to patients. To attain this goal, nurses must work in collaboration with other members of the health care team. To improve efficiency, the health care environment must foster the development of collaborative relations among health care professionals. Trust, open communication, commitment, and shared goals must be present to support collaborative relations and effective teamwork.