King's Theory Of A Nursing Theory

To be called a nursing theory, the theory has to include these four concepts: the person (patient), the environment, health, and nursing. These four concepts differentiate nursing from all other professions and provide specific ways to care for the patient. Imogene King’s Theory of Goal Attainment and Conceptual Systems perceives nursing and its concepts as systems that all correlate and have an effect on the patient and their goals. Imogene King felt that the development of the nursing theory in the 1960s was lacking and that nurses were more concerned about how the profession was practiced and less about why the profession is practiced a certain way. King sought to develop a framework that would serve as the foundation of a theory that would illuminate the “why” of nursing, so she developed the Theory of Goal Attainment (Caceres, 2015). When you just think about the ‘how’ you are not thinking about the whole system. A nurse knows ‘how’ to give potassium but if she does not know ‘why’ she is giving the potassium (because the patient’s potassium levels were low, under

King’s conceptual systems help to put those people (our patients, family, colleagues), their issues (poor health, chemical dependence), and their environment (culture, social environment), into three systems that if we, healthcare providers, take into account, can help achieve health. King’s Theory of Goal Attainment focuses on the nurse-client relationship, takes into account the systems, and emphasizes the importance of it to achieve the wanted outcome. Nursing’s domain involves human beings, families, and communities as a framework within which nurses make transactions in multiple environments with health as a goal (King, The Theory of Goal Attainment in Research and Practice, 1996). King’s system help us, as nurses, respect differences within our world and through those differences, achieve the goal: