Nurse Practitioner Models of Care — Dorothea Orem

The objective of this work in writing is to choose a model of nursing care. The model chosen is that of Dorothea Orem. Orem’s ‘Self-Care Deficit Theory’ is a general theory of nursing and one of the most utilized models in nursing in contemporary times.Nurse Practitioner Models of Care — Dorothea Orem

Dorothea Orem – Background

Dorothea Orem was born in 1914 in Baltimore, Maryland. Orem earned her nursing diploma in the earlier part of the 1930s from Providence Hospital School of Nursing, Washington, D.C. As well as receiving three honorary doctorates and an Alumni Achievement Award for Nursing Theory in 1980 from Catholic University of America. (Bridge, Cabell, and Herring, paraphrased) Orem gained experience early in her nursing career in various hospital clinical settings as a staff nurse.

The work of Bridge, Cabell, and Herring (nd) states that Orem recalls from early in her career while serving as director of nursing service at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan that “she was asked a substantive question and didn’t have an answer because she ‘had no conceptualization of nursing’.” (p.2) Orem is reported to have related that while working at Indiana University she found that there was difficulty in the articulation of nurses to the administrators of the hospital in regards to their needs “in the face of demands made upon them regarding such issues as length of stay, scheduling admissions and discharges…” (Bridge, Cabell, and Herring, nd, p. 2)Nurse Practitioner Models of Care — Dorothea Orem