Myra Levine

How a nurse is defined can be very influential to their performance on a daily basis. The exact definition of the work a nurse does can shed a new light into a profession that many find noble and humbling. Myra Levine has a unique outlook on the world of nursing care that many would find confusing. The application of her theory has been attempted by nurses in several differ types of work such as wound management described by Leach (1999). This paper will show the nursing theorist along with her work of the conservation model to depict healthcare. Myra Levine completed her conservation model in 1973 in an attempt to teach associate degree students a new approach for daily nursing activities. The 1970’s was an era in which the nursing profession was fighting many battles on the socio-economic front. The dominant race and gender of nursing was white
The theory of conservation, as discussed earlier in this paper, is the balance of energy in the patient’s internal and external environments. Nursing care attempts to rebalance this energy after the individual fails to adapt to the external challenge. The theory of therapeutic intention discusses the nurse’s role in the healing process. “Nurses do no harm to patients” (Potter & Perry, 2003). This statement is accepted worldwide and integrated into Levine’s conservation model through the theory of therapeutic intention. Nursing care provides the patient with positive influences to restore the individual to an optimal level of health. Nursing care should not be detrimental to the patient in any aspect (Courcey, n.d.). The theory of redundancy is the patient’s fail-safe mode in which their internal anatomical, physiological, and psychological systems take over after a failed adaptation