Applying the Theory of Adaptation to a Medical Surgical Floor Care Setting

Nursing

The theory that I propose to work with is Sister Callista Roy's Adaptation Theory. This theory was developed by Sister Callista Roy in 1970, when she described it in the journal Nursing Outlook.

There are two reasons why this theory might benefit the unit. The first is that if adopted it should improve patient outcomes by providing them with a better environment. The second is that nurses will be providing the patient with the sense of purposefulness that they need to recover. The theory is rooted in the idea that humans are holistic beings who are in constant interaction with their environment. The environment is comprised of three types of stimuli -- focal, contextual and residual. Focal stimuli are the things that immediate confront the human and require the most attention. Contextual stimuli are the rest of the immediate items, which residual stimuli are and added environmental factors present (Vera, 2014).

Health in this context is the state where the human can adapt to their condition, and illness is the state where they cannot. As such, one of the most important roles of the nurse is to help the human to adapt to their circumstances. Illness is part of life, and the patient needs to accept and adapt to their situation, in order to thrive. Nurses play a key role in facilitating this adaptation. The do this by taking care of basic needs, and furthermore by ensuring that the person has a sense of purposefulness, some sort of role function and that there is recognition of the role of giving love, respect and value, and other elements of human interdependence.

3. The biggest risk in adopting the theory is that it requires a high level of caring. In a situation where nurses might feel mainly obliged to take care of basic needs, Roy's model asks nurses to find different ways to help patients, that go beyond taking care of those basic needs. It will be important to help train the nurses with respect to the different things they will need to know -- like identifying the patient's social needs and ensuring that these are met, with family, friends or other people in their lives. The nurses may find that they need to be more efficient when performing basic maintenance tasks, but I do not envision that nurses will need to spend any more time than they already do with respect to helping and caring -- these tasks may only be redirected towards different activities, with the principle of helping the patients to adapt.

4. Working with Roy's Adaptation Model does not preclude the ability of the organization to use data, either. The same measures that we use now to evaluate the patient outcomes can be used going forward to evaluate whether or not patient outcomes have improved. First, we can look at length of stay. Six months should be enough time to build up a sufficient data set to analyze these. . Patient satisfaction surveys are another means of measuring outcomes that we use already. Further, re-admittances are something that should clearly be improved by handling the process of adaptation better. With better adaptation, patients should be able to handle their post-surgical lives. It is apparent that people who adapt poorly end up back in the medical system with a high rate of frequency, a situation that bodes poorly for their health, but also for the financial state of the facility itself. By focusing on length of stay and readmittance rates especially, the value of adopting the Adaption Theory should be evident, and should be so within six months as that will produce a sufficiently large data set.