Roy’s Adaptation Model for Nursing Essay

Background

Roy is an American nun and a nursing theorist, with several degrees in nursing and sociology. In the 1960s, she worked with Dorothy E. Johnson and contributed to creating a conceptual nursing model, but her interest was directed to adaptation resiliency among children (Phillips & Harris, 2018). In 1970, Roy introduced the model to apply a conceptual path to understanding human behaviors (Roy & Andrews, 1999). As soon as nurses started viewing human beings as adaptive systems, it became easier to assess behaviors and stimuli, make nursing diagnoses, set goals, or promote interventions and evaluations (Roy & Andrews, 1999).

The environment always undergoes a number of significant changes, and people should be ready to recognize, accept, and develop appropriate reactions. According to Newman and Leininger (as cited in Roy & Andrews, 1999), health awareness must be grounded in personal experiences, and nursing care is determined by cultural accommodations and professional knowledge. Before Roy, no steps to combine the concepts of the environment and human adaptation abilities were made; therefore, this model is a necessary point in nursing development.

Description

In nursing practice, the staff needs to know how to support patients and their families in adapting their behaviors. Roy paid attention to the impact of scientific and philosophical assumptions. The scientific aspect is grounded on the works by von Bertalanffy (general systems) and Helson (adaptation-level theory) and includes the principles of holism, control, feedback, and processes (Phillips & Harris, 2018; Roy & Andrews, 1999).

The philosophical perspective touches upon the concepts of humanism and permittivity (Roy & Andrews, 1999). One of Roy’s main thoughts was the importance of religious faith in healing and well-being, but she tried to find another way to investigate human existence. To be rational, people should develop value-based, purposeful, and related behaviors, which are the main characteristics of creativity.

Roy’s model proves that people have to be in constant interaction with the environment. During this process, the exchange of information occurs, predetermining available resources and knowledge. Regarding the offered assumptions, humans are decision-makers, and the creativity of their actions depends on how well they may co-exist within the offered situation.

Conscious awareness plays a vital role in patients’ possibilities to respond positively to changes and behave following the standards (Roy & Andrews, 1999). Roy underlines the role of God and the development of mutual relationships. People possess enough skills to sustain and transform the environment as per their needs. Their beliefs and attitudes toward each other and the environment have to be recognized to take correct self-care steps and cooperate with nurses.

Concepts

The Adaptation Model of Nursing contributes to a sufficient explanation of nursing science and an individual as an interrelated (adaptive) system to balance stimuli and processes. The discussion of humans as adaptive systems includes stimuli and their possibility to make up the adaptation level as an internal input. The model also conceptualizes the dynamics between an individual and the coping processes, categorized into the regulator and cognate subsystems. Each subsystem is characterized by four specific modes with the help of which people formulate their behaviors and expectations in relation to the environment, health, and nursing.

Stimuli. There are three types of stimuli in the chosen model (Roy & Andrews, 1999). First, the focal stimulus covers internal and external factors that confront the human system (e.g., pain, fever, fear, or anxiety). Second, the contextual stimulus is associated with other situational factors that may influence focal stimuli (e.g., poor awareness of a situation or lack of supportive objects). Third, the residual stimulus includes the environmental factors, the impact of which remains unclear in the situation (e.g., past experience or neglected memories).

Roy and Andrews (1999) underline that due to a constantly changing environment, many stimuli cannot become focal, and the human system fails to recognize them. Therefore, when nurses use the Roy Adaptation Model to view a patient, stimuli like positive or negative environmental changes are noted as focal. When focal stimuli are defined, it is easier to differentiate contextual stimuli because they make some contributions with time and facilitate adverse outcomes. Identifying residual stimuli, nurses rely on their intuitive impressions after communication with patients and personal observations.

Adaptation level. According to Roy’s model,