Introduction
Self-care deficit theory focuses on the practical role of a nurse and explains the interrelation of caregiver and care receiver in relation to the environment, health, and wellbeing. The theory implies that patients have the capacity for self-care and the nurse’s role is in supporting and enlarging this capacity. Orem’s theory is a major nursing theory that has impacted theory and practice around the world enabling nurses to deliver the best care to their patients. This is partly the reason why this theory became the choice for the present research. Another reason is that it promotes the use of patient education and broadens the horizons of healthcare personnel on forming meaningful connections with care receivers. The purpose of the paper is to increase awareness of fellow nurses of Orem’s nursing theory, expand one’s knowledge on the elements of the theorist’s creation and build a solid knowledge of the ways of its implementation into daily practice.
Orem’s Biography
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem was born in 1914 and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Her scientific interest in nursing education began from enrolling into the Catholic University of America where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1939 (“Dorothea Orem Collection,” n.d.). After 6 years of practice in various hospitals, she decided to focus on receiving higher degrees and started to practice teaching on her own. She taught biology and nursing in colleges and universities across the country, offered her consultations to the U.S. Board of Health and clinical institutions. Orem’s practice, teaching, and research experience seem to have led her to the publishing of the book Nursing: Concepts of Practice, where she described her self-care deficit theory (“Dorothea Orem Collection,” n.d.). Self-care deficit was later classified as a grand nursing theory for its comprehensive nature (McEwen & Wills, 2018). After that, she continued enhancing and updating it, while receiving distinction for her service to the nursing cause until she tragically passed away in 2007.
Major Influences
One of the major factors that influenced Dorothea Orem’s decision to introduce her theory is practice. During her years of serving as a hospital nurse, she saw the flaws in the procedures of nurse-patient relationships. The lack of patient education, as she noted, was one of the factors that influenced the health and well-being of patients as they left hospitals and had to be readmitted (Berbiglia & Banfield, 2013). This fact gives the theory a strong practical affinity.
Her nursing philosophy was drawn from realism as she was rationally assessing the interrelation of nursing, health, nature, and human beings. Her views may be attributed to moderate realism, which was also practiced by Taylor, Geden, and Wongvatunyu. According to moderate realists, the world exists separately from the ideas and knowledge about it, can be a target of cognitive process, yet cannot be changed or majorly influenced by them. In Orem’s self-care deficit theory, this concept has found implementation in four categories of ontological entities she defined (Berbiglia & Banfield, 2013). Her views on a person as an agent and deliberate nature of actions were based on the theoretical works of scientists such as Wallace, Parsons, and Arnold.
Conclusion
All in all, the self-care deficit theory is an influential framework that was developed by a person whose heart and mind were devoted to nursing. Orem’s practice and research have greatly contributed to the development of her major creation. Her hospital nurse career and realism-based philosophical views shaped a comprehensive and practice-attuned work that is still operational today.
References
Berbiglia, V. A., & Banfield, B. (2013). Self-care deficit theory of nursing. In M. Alligood & A. Tomey (Eds.), Nursing Theorists and Their Work-E-Book (pp. 240-266). New York, NY: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Dorothea Orem Collection. (n.d.). Web.
McEwen, M., & Wills, E. M. (2018). Theoretical basis for nursing. New York, NY: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.