Sister Callista Roy's contributions to nursing theory

Sr. Callista Roy and her Adaptation Model of Nursing

Dr. Callista Roy has proven herself an innovative figure in the field of nursing. Throughout her career, she has made patient adaptation one of her primary concerns. Through the years, she has been forming and perfecting her model of adaptation as it applies to the care of recently injured individuals. She believed that the external environment had an affect on the cognitive healing of recently injured patients. Using this idea, she constructed a model for nursing which incorporated regulation of a patient's environment to improve that patient's health. Today, the Roy adaptation model is currently being applied to thousands of patients all over the country.

Sr. Callista Roy was born in 1939. She received her B.A. At Mount Saint Mary's University in Ls Angeles, California. After receiving her degree, she later worked on staff at Mount Saint Mary's during her formation of the Roy adaptation model. She later attended University of California Los Angeles in the 1960's, where she received both a Master of Arts and a Master of Sciences, as well as a PhD. She received her Master's Degree within the Pediatric Nursing department at the California University. While she was attending UCLA, she began formally structuring her version of adaptation involved in nursing. Her advisor at the University during completion of her Master's thesis, Dorothy E. Johnson, influenced Roy with her own personal views on the theory of adaptation. Roy now teaches at Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing and is still actively writing about the implementation of the Roy adoption model in real situations. She, along with the Roy Adaptation Association, has judged over two hundred research projects focused on the application of the Roy model of adaptation within the nursing field, ("Sr. Callista Roy, PhD, RN, FAAN: Professor and Nurse Theorist," Boston College).

The Roy model of adaptation was based on previous theories first presented by von Bertalanffy and Helson, ("The Roy Adaptation Model," Boston College). Helson believed that adaptation was the improvement of patients who experienced positive changes in environment as they healed. He believed that there were three types of stimuli which influenced recovery including focal stimuli, contextual stimuli, and residual stimuli. Focal stimuli include the individual's immediate surroundings which directly affect that individual, such as the bed that patient lies on daily. Contextual stimuli is made up of a patient's other surroundings. These surroundings are present in the mind of the individual, but are placed more in the background than the focal stimuli. The residual stimulus consists of parts of the patient's surroundings which serve an ambiguous purpose in the recovery and general cognitive well being of the patient. The adaptation model of nursing presumes that the individual patient is fully cognitive after an injury and during recovery. During this consciousness, each patient creates a unique relationship with their environment. Actual adaptation is a product of combining the cognitive mind and the environment which surrounds it.

The Roy adaptation model believes that the human mind has heightened creative abilities, along with the conception of fate. This version of the adaptation method involves steps to nursing which asses the situation and recognizes clues within the immediate environment of injured patients. Once these clues are diagnosed, the goal of the nurse is to best assist the individual patient in cognitive and behavioral healing. Some of Roy's recent projects include working on intervention studies of recently injured patients. She involves the family members of injured patients to help in the recovery of their cognitive functions which were damaged.

Data gathering becomes much more broad and significant when the Roy adaptation model is applied to a patient. As nurses spend time on examining the surroundings of their patients, they can customize the best plan for recovery for each individual patient. Successful assessment of a patient's environment is a key element of applying the Roy model of adaptation. In her work, "Implementing the Roy Adaptation: From Theory to Practice," Pamela Senesac states that "individual nurses use the model as a framework to conceptualize and plan the care of patients one at a time," (Senesac 2007).