Application of the McGill Model of Nursing - Essay Example

? The McGill model of nursing and how I shall apply the theory/practice the model in my clinical nursing practice Supervisor: May 8, 2013 The McGill model of nursing and how I shall apply the theory/practice the model in my clinical nursing practice Introduction Nursing is a field in health science that aims at provision of care to people, families, and the society. It aims at achieving a desirable level of health standards and at sustaining achieved levels for quality of life. In order to achieve these objectives, nurses apply diversified strategies such as theories and models as bases for developing approaches to provision of care. The McGill Model is one of the applicable theories. I, in this paper, demonstrate my analytical potentials over knowledge and application of the McGill Model and its application. Introduction of the McGill Model of Nursing and its author The McGill model of Nursing is a health promotion model that developed from the idea of nursing as a significant field in the provision of health care. The concept established a distinct scope of nursing and its role in care provision. History of the model traces back to the year 1960 in which healthcare in Canada underwent a transition. A new health care insurance cover was introduced and this established a higher demand for care. The increased demand also identified the need for more health care roles that could help in meeting the society’s demands and the University of McGill and other stakeholders explored opportunities for expanding nursing roles. The University’s School of Nursing then developed a new scope of the nursing profession by establishing nurses’ roles in the year 1970. The developed model recognized the role of nurses to people and their families in the Allen Model that was refined through empirical research and was later renamed to the McGill model of nursing (Creek and Mooney, 2012). The developmental process of the model identifies Dr Moyra Allen as its author. The model was developed under learning environments, by students, but with the academician’s guidance and supervision. Moyra’s recognition as the model’s author was more significant with the model’s original name, Allen Model, which allowed her absolute authority over its authorship. Dr. Allen Joined the McGill’s School of Nursing the year 1954 and was an active researcher in the field of nursing when she spearheaded development of the model (Creek and Mooney, 2012). Description of the McGill Model of Nursing The McGill Model of Nursing has a wide scope and its description can be effectively achieved through exploration of its purpose, its principal assumptions, its primary concepts and its structural model. Purpose The scope of the model and its application serves two purposes towards people’s health and the overall welfare of the society. It aims at promoting well being in the society and provision of care to individuals, in their family constructs (Austin and Boyd, 2010). Underlying assumptions The model is based on three core assumptions. The first assumption is the potential among families that develops a foundation for strategies towards healthy practices. This assumption recognizes the power of the family to strengthen a person endeavors for a wellness condition. Such strengths may be psychological support or encouragements. Motivation is another element of the family’s power in the model and can be derived from social background empowerment and development of norms towards healthy behaviors. Families’ potentials in the model are similarly derived from economic abilities that can offer resources for supporting an individual’s efforts for a healthy standard. The model also assumes a relationship between family-based efforts towards health care and the success in family care programs. Poor efforts at family levels therefore identify lower care success at family level while higher level of efforts culminates to effective care promotion at the family level. The model also assumes that promotion of care results in responsible health behavior among members of the society and a better quality of health (Austin and Boyd, 2010). Primary concepts The McGill Model of Nursing has four core concepts, “health, family (person), collaboration, and learning” (Austin and Boyd, 2010, p. 104). The concept of health is derived from the primary scope of nursing that seeks to establish people’s well being. The concept is further associated with presence of illnesses in the society and its aspects of “coping and development” promotes a person’s roles and utility in life (Austin and Boyd, 2010, p. 104). The model’s concept of person or family refers to its center of focus. The concept of person is however diverse and include relationships that the person or family engage in it the environment. Further, the person’s interactions are unrestricted and the environment is defined in terms of derivable learning about “health and healthy ways” (Austin and Boyd, 2010, p. 104). Collaboration however develops an atmosphere for a favorable learning towards meeting health care needs of the person. Like collaboration, learning is instrumental to development of an environment that facilitates achievement of care need by the person. The four concepts therefore integrate to facilitate the model’s objective of promoting health care among individuals in the society (Austin and Boyd, 2010; Gottlieb and Rowat, 1987). Structure of the model Structure of the McGill Model of Nursing identifies two stakeholders, the environment in which the stakeholders interact and their objective. The person and the nurse are the stakeholders with the nurse as the care provider while the person or family is the recipient who also plays an active role in deriving utility from the offered care. These occur in the care environment that can be in a health care facility or within the person’s locality (Austin and Boyd, 2010; McGill, 2013). Role of McGill Model of Nursing in addressing the concept of person, environment, health, and nursing The McGill Model of Nursing plays a collaborative role in addressing the concept of person, environment, health, and nursing by integrating the person and the care provider towards healthy behaviors (Young and Paterson, 2007). The model and my personal philosophy of nursing The model corresponds with my philosophy of collective responsibility towards achievement of health care needs. My philosophy, especially towards prevention and management of chronic illnesses, identifies the role of all members of the society in ensuring well being of the ill members of the society and safeguarding the rest from contracting illnesses. This is consistent with the model’s focus on the family and its support to an individual towards a healthy life. The model’s reliance on the family’s potentials is also consistent with my philosophy that transfers burden of care from health care personnel and identify responsibility of the entire society in people’s health. Its collective approach is however restricted to a narrow scope (Young and Paterson, 2007). My perceived strengths of the model The concept of collaboration and the family are the model’s strength. The two concepts establish bases from which the model can achieve its objective of improved health in the society. The concept of family, through its diversified potentials in resources, empowerment, and encouragement, facilitates healthy behavior because identifying the potentials and promoting their exploitation enables the model to meet its objective. The collaborative concept that integrates potentials and efforts from care providers and the person also ensures availability of resources and competence for modification of behavior and management of illnesses (Austin and Boyd, 2010). The model’s incorporation of the nursing process The model incorporates the nursing process in its overall objectives, though its concepts of health, family, collaboration, and environment also identify with the nursing process. The nursing process, however, involves “assessment, “diagnosis,” “planning,” “implementation,” and “evaluation” stages (Timby, 2009, p. 17). The assessment process involves generation of information about a patient and review of the data for determining inconsistencies in the patient’s health. Diagnosis, identification of the actual problem into an illness or complication, follows this before a plan for corrective measures is established, implemented, and monitored for effectiveness. The concept of family that identifies empowerment and motivation encompasses the assessment stage of the nursing process in which a nurse incorporates a client’s ability to communicate in order to collect data on the client’s health condition. A person’s background that determines ability to communicate as well as the financial ability to access care personnel is also identifiable. The collaboration aspect also incorporates the assessment stage in which the client works with personnel. Further, the implementation stage and evaluation stage of the nursing process identifies the collaboration concept in which learning is the major activity towards determining actions for health care objectives. Implementation also occurs with the aid of elements of the model’s concept of the environment. This means that the McGill Model of Nursing encompasses major phases of the nursing process though the model’s environments that offers potentials and resources for achieving the achieving successful implementation of the nursing process (Timby, 2009; Smeltzer, Bare, Hinkle and Cheever, 2010; Creek and Mooney, 2012). Analysis and evaluation of how I would apply the model during assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation of patient care I will take advantage of patient’s potential to derive as much information as possible during assessment stage of the research process. I would also educate the patient on his or her role in facilitating the assessment process through corporation. I would however not depend on the model during the diagnosis process in which I will rely on tests and technology. I will also ensure that the patient is informed of the environment and possible roles that he or she can play in the nursing process. This will follow a learning approach before I incorporate concepts of family in planning for implementation by identifying involved potentials and weaknesses. My planning will then minimize possible effects of weaknesses in the family concept and exploit identified potentials to ensure effective implementation. I will also engage the patient and close relations in the implementation process. Finally, I will deviate from the model in my evaluation stage at which I will apply monitoring and analytical potentials (Timby, 2009; Creek and Mooney, 2012). The McGill Model of Nursing and health care promotion and primary health care principles The McGill Model of Nursing addresses health care promotion by ensuring an empowered society and environment that can resolve health care problems. This identifies a resultant well-being and a facilitated health because of the model’s concepts of family, health, collaboration, and environment. The model also addresses primary principles of primary healthcare through its different concepts. It for example addresses the principle of empowerment through its facilitated learning that equips members of the society. The model’s identification of potentials towards promotion of health, from the concept of family, also establishes grounds for empowerment and therefore addresses the principle of developing the family construct and a person’s relations. The McGill model also addresses the principle of macro-social activity through extending the family concept to relation that can form an extensive web to integrate a larger section of the community. The model does not however address some primary health care principles such as “equitable distribution,” “appropriate technology,” and multi-sectored approach (Basavanthappa, 2008). The remaining principles can be addressed through “equity,” “social justice,” and “empowerment” and I will incorporate legal and ethical concepts to ensure that they are addressed in my scope of practice (Talbot and Verrinder, 2010, n.p.). This is because law and morality in the society ensures the principles (Talbot and Verrinder, 2010). Perceived gaps in application of the McGill Model of Nursing and strategies for addressing the gaps The background of the model’s development identifies its sufficiency in meeting its original intentions. Having been developed to remedy scarcity of resources to meet the expanded demand of health care, the collaborative approach of the model ensured empowerment towards responsibility at personal or family level, through the concept of family. The restricted foundation of the model that focused on the demand for healthcare however identifies many gaps. One of the significant gaps in the model is its lack of concepts to ensure that health care facilities and services are equitably available to every member of the society. Even though the concept of family has an extended scope to relations, such webs are restricted to social ties and are voluntary. This therefore means that a person’s accessibility to health care and the quality of such care will rely on the person’s nature of the family concept and the reality of social and economic inequality introduces differences in family potentials in resources and empowerment aspects. While an individual from a wealthy background may have necessary resources to support health care efforts and behavior, and support from equally wealthy members of the individual’s family concept can support this, those from poor background may lack resources to support care process and therefore rely on care providers for any available level of quality of care. The model therefore extends stratification from social and economic environments into the provision of care (Basavanthappa, 2008). Another identifiable gap in the nursing model is in limited recognition of application of technology to facilitate the scope of care. This has a potential effect on philosophies that nurses may develop and consequently affect approaches to care provision and the achieved quality of health. A nurse may for example be influenced by the model to only recognize the model’s concepts as the fundamentals to improving health and therefore disregard significant contemporary applications such as technology that are significant to the scope of implementing nursing roles. Being quite on application of technology therefore threatens nurse’s willingness to apply the developments because they are not explicit components of the model and this may undermine efficiencies that are associated with technology such as in assessment, implementation, and evaluation stages of the nursing process. These stages can be empowered by contemporary technology. Lack of frameworks for incorporating efforts from different sectors through identifying the role of diversified stakeholders to the nursing profession is another gap of the model that offers a threat to care provision. The model’s concept of family restricts responsibility to care provision and prevent possible participation from other sectors such as the private sector’s corporate social responsibility initiatives or the role of well-wishers. Nurses who play a major role in formulating the environment in which resources and potentials can be integrated may also have a negative opinion, based on the model’s scope and fail to encourage patients to extend their family concept webs for better potentials. The model can also evoke a nurse’s negative attitude towards extended webs upon which the nurse may discourage such relations in empowering the concept of person (Basavanthappa, 2008). My application of the model in my practice will involve a dynamic approach that will be sensitive to the environment, needs in each health care situation, and limitations of the situations in order to seek a flexible approach that integrates the McGill Model of Nursing with other theories and resources towards effective care and better health standards. I would therefore extend the concept of family to incorporate the entire society and the role of contemporary technology as elements of personal philosophy. These adjustments will develop an integrated basis that will be more effective in promoting health (Basavanthappa, 2008). Conclusion The McGill Model of Nursing was developed to meet high demand for care services in the society. It aims at promoting health through the concepts of health, family, collaboration , and environment. The concept of family offers the model’s strengths through motivation, empowerment, and resource potentials that facilitate self-reliance and activity in the process of care provision. The model’s major weakness is however its limitation to address different principles of primary care such as fair distribution of resources, extended stakeholders, and incorporation of technology. I however plan to be flexible and dynamic in order to incorporate available resources to facilitate empowerment in delivery of health care. References Austin. and Boyd, M. (2010). Psychiatric & mental health nursing for Canadian practice. Baltimore, MA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Basavanthappa, B. (2008). Community health nursing. New Delhi: Jaypee Brothers Publishers. Creek, L. and Mooney, S. (2012). Parish nurses health care chaplains and community clergy. New York, NY: Routledge. Gottlieb, L. and Rowat, K. (1987). The McGill model of nursing: A practice-derived model. Adv Nurs Sci 9(4), 51-61. Smeltzer, S., Bare, B., Hinkle, J. and Cheever, K. (2010). Brunner & Suddarth’s text of medical-surgical nursing. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Talbot, L. and Verrinder, G. (2010). Promoting health: The primary health care approach. Amsterdam: Elsevier Health Sciences. Timby, B. (2009). Fundamental nursing skills and concepts. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Young, L. and Paterson, B. (2007). Teaching nursing: Developing a student-centered learning environment. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Read More