Sr. Callista Roy
Sister Callista Roy was named after Saint Callistus, a pope and martyr, from the Roman calendar on the day of her birth, October 14, 1939 at the Los Angeles Country General Hospital to a big family, which was deeply devoted to God and the service of others (Office of the Nurse Theorist 2002). Her mother was a nurse who lived and taught the values of faith, hope and love to her children, so that at 14, Sister Callista herself worked at a large general hospital as a pantry girl, as a maid and then as a nurse's aid. She entered the convent and became one of the sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondolet for 40 years. During that time, she earned a bachelor's degree, major in Nursing, at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles (Office of the Nurse Theorist). As a young nun and nurse, she worked in hospitals administered by her congregation, which enabled her to demonstrate her love and concern especially to hospitalized children. This led her to enroll in a master's degree program in pediatric nursing at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964 during which she received instruction from mentors, including Dorothy e. Johnson, Ruth Wu, Connie Robinson and Barbara Smith Moran (Office of the Nurse Theorist).
During her first seminar under mentor Dorothy Johnson, Sister Callista proposed that the goal of nursing was patient adaptation and this became her framework (Gray 2003). Her framework was first influenced by von Bertalanffy and Helson who delved into the three types of stimuli involved in adaptation, namely, focal, contextual and residual, and she used these stimuli in describing the conditions of the healthy and the sick. Her first write-up on her derived model was published in May 1970 and. By 1987, at least 100,000 nurses throughout the world took programs that used Roy's adaptation model (Gray).
Sister Callista Roy's theory has been applied to health teaching about osteoporosis and breastfeeding and emphasizes the significance of adapting to environmental conditions to promote and facilitate healing and recovery (Shaner 2004). While it made sense in many cases, critics felt that adaptation was not always the best method of responding to the environment, such as in conditions of poor air quality or toxic substances. Doing so could, instead, lead to diseased conditions, such as cancer or asthma, rather than promote or facilitate healing. Florence Nightingale advocated that nurses adjusted environmental conditions to which patients were subjected, rather than the patients adapting to these conditions in the environment (Gray). There were times when the best option was precisely to leave the situation alone, if it cannot be changed or a nurse to intervene in order to change the condition or situation in the environment.
In light of these observations and developments, Sister Callista modified her model by redefining adaptation and adjusting her philosophy into one that viewed persons as extensions of their physical and social environments (Gray 2003). She updated her model to include relationships and to expand adaptation into the three levels of integrated life, compensatory and compromised processes. And she continues to upgrade it as developments unfold and the nursing profession responds to these developments (Gray).
Sister Callista's scientific assumptions (Gray 2003) consist of: systems of matter and energy that progress to higher levels of complex self-organization; a person's consciousness and meaning that coexist and integrate with the environment; self-awareness and awareness of the environment that derive from thought and feeling; the integration of these processes from the free choices that individuals make; thought and feeling as mediating human action; acceptance, protection and the fostering of independence as occurring in system relationships; universal and integral relationship between individuals and the earth; individual and environmental transformations as occurring and crafted in human consciousness; and the integration of human and environmental meanings as resulting in adaptation (Gray). Her philosophical assumptions derive from the mutual relationships that the individual has with the world and God, human meaning is rooted on a converging point of the universe; God is intimately revealed in the diversity of creation as the common destiny of all in it; the creative use of awareness, enlightenment and faith enables the individual; and human accountability for the deriving, sustaining and changing the universe (Gray).
Her concept of persons and relationships with other persons encompass an adaptive system with coping processes and a composite whole; an inclusive collection of individuals from families, organizations, communities, nations and the human society as a whole; and an adaptive system that inherently possesses subsystems that recognize and regulate acting in order to support adaptation in the physiologic-physical, self-concept-group identity, role function, and interdependent adaptive modes (Gray 2003)....
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