Biomedical Model Nursing

Nursing is an art and a skill that involves caring for people who are disadvantaged by virtue of being in poor physical, mental, social, or even spiritual health. The aim of nursing is to promote health through a variety of different interventions, but mainly involves the use of medical interventions in contrast to holistic interventions. Nursing also has a history of operating within the biomedical model, which focuses mainly on the illness and not the individual (Oberle & Bouchal, 2009). Because of the use of the biomedical model and lack of holistic care, some patients who visit hospitals are treated differently or poorly due to a failure of nurses to recognize the things that impact the patient’s health that are outside of the patient’s
The fact that the nurse needed to tell the student the patient he had chosen was homeless is an example of treating this patient as the ‘other’ which is described by Bunkers (2003) as a way of creating a difference between ourselves and someone who does not fit into the societal norms. The problem created by othering is that it does not serve a benefit in creating a positive relationship between the nurse and the patient. MacCallum (2002) found that nurses use othering as a way of removing power from an individual and putting it into the hands of the nurse. An asymmetrical balance of power already exists within the relationship between the nurse and the patient. If the patient’s power within the relationship becomes compromised his or her ‘room for action’ or autonomy will be compromised as well (Delmar, 2012). The process of making the patient the other becomes an ethical issue because patient autonomy is lost. The patient can no longer advocate for themselves, which may result in poor treatment as seen in the
McNeil, Guirguis-Younger, Dilley, Turnbull, and Hwang (2013) found that clinicians felt that their training did not prepare them to address the deficits within the social determinants of health that many homeless people face. This is congruent with the study by Crowe, Minick, and Meinersmann (2015) who found that “the nurse/patient relationship which impacts patient outcomes may be strained due to bias, time constraints, and a lack of connection” between health care workers and homeless patients. The research from McNeil et al. (2013) came to a similar conclusion as the research from Jerrell et al. (2014); both studies found that one of the ways people providing health care can improve understanding of homeless populations was by actually spending time with them outside of the health care setting. McNeil et al. (2013) found that a process of gaining real world experience with the population and then reflecting on what had happened was the most effective way for health care workers to improve the knowledge they had about the hardships faced by this