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An Understanding of Roy's Adaptation Theory

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The History of the Roy Adaptation Model The Roy Adaptation Model for Nursing had it's beginning with Sister Callista Roy entered the masters program in pediatric nursing at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1964. Dorothy E. Johnson, Roy's advisor and seminar faculty, was speaking at the time on the need to define the goal of nursing as a way of focusing the development of knowledge for practice. During Roy's first seminar in pediatric nursing, she proposed that the goal of nursing was promoting patient adaptation. Johnson encouraged her to develop her concept of adaptation as a framework for nursing, throughout the course of her master's program. Von Vertalanffy's use of systems theory was a key component in the early …show more content…

The internal and external environment provide input or stimuli. The environment is always changing and interacting with the person. The stimuli are divided into focal; contextual, and residual categories. Focal stimuli immediately confronts the adaptive system. Contextual stimuli or "background stimuli" is genetic makeup, sex, maturity, drugs, alcohol, etc. Residual stimuli are beliefs, attitudes, experiences, traits which may be relevant but effects are indeterminate and therefore cannot be validated. Nursing According to Roy, the Nurse using the Nursing Process, promotes adaptation responses during health and illness to free energy from ineffective or inadequate responses to increase health and wellness. Goals, mutually agreed on and prioritized, are proposed to meet the global goals of: survival/growth and promotion/reproduction of race/society/attaining full potential or mastery of self. The nurse uses activities to increase adaptive and decrease ineffective responses during illness and health. These activities alter or manipulate the client's focal, contextual and residual stimuli and expand his repertoire of effective coping mechanisms. Nursing focuses on the person as a biopsychosocial being at some point along the health-illness continuum. In contrast, medicine focuses on biological systems and the patient's

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