Nurse Hildegard Peplau - Essay Example

Master of Arts in Psychiatric Nursing from Teachers College, Columbia, New York in 1947; and a Doctor of Education in Curriculum Development from Columbia in 1953.

            During World War II, she became a member of the Army Nurse Corps and worked in a neuropsychiatric hospital in London, England. She also did work at Bellevue and Chestnut Lodge Psychiatric Facilities and was in contact with renowned psychiatrists Freida Fromm-Richman and Harry Stack Sullivan.

From the beginning of her career in the late 1930s, Peplau worked tirelessly to advance nursing education and practice. Her efforts and excellent leadership saved the American Nurses Association from bankruptcy and moved the nursing profession towards scientific recognition and respectability.

She was recognized for her numerous contributions to the nursing profession. Peplau has been considered as one of the renowned nursing leaders of her time. Her writings and research were repeatedly featured in the American Journal of Nursing from 1951 to 1960. She became a professor emeritus at Rutgers shortly after obtaining her doctorate. She established the first nursing post-baccalaureate program and eventually held the title of executive director and president of the American Nurses Association. She promoted professional standards and regulation through credentialing, as well as introduced the concept of advanced nursing practice. She advocated on behalf of nurses by advancing their status as professionals. She worked progressively in the mental health field and ultimately created a conceptual framework for the interpersonal relationship between nurses and their patients. She was honored as a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nurses.

Starting in the early 1950s, she published many texts, beginning with a manuscript of a compilation of her theoretical framework for psychodynamic nursing entitled Interpersonal Relations in Nursing (published in 1952). She taught psychodynamic nursing and stressed the nurse’s ability to understand his or her behavior to help others identify perceived difficulties. She identified the following phases of the nurse-patient relationship: orientation, identification, exploitation, and resolution. She also explored the changing aspects of the nurse-patient relationship and identified six roles that could emerge from it: stranger, resource person, teacher, leader, surrogate, and counselor. Secondary roles played by the nurse include the technical expert, mediator, safety agent, researcher, tutor, and manager of the environment. In addition, she discussed four psychobiological experiences that induce destructive and constructive responses: needs, frustrations, conflicts, and anxieties.

Peplau’s theory is mostly utilized in psychiatric/mental health nursing as its success is closely related to the relationship between the nurse and the patient. Caring for persons with mental illness necessitates knowledge and understanding of the patient’s perceptions, concerns, and thought processes. Her theory is mostly applied in caring for depressed patients and victims of domestic violence. Clinicians make use of the nurse-patient relationship to treat the patient holistically and to establish and communicate common goals for treatment.