Roy Adaptation Theory

The Roy Adaptation Theory

Callista L. Roy, RN, PhD, is a Professor and Nurse Theorist at the William F. Connell School of Nursing at Boston College, where she teaches doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate students. Dr. Roy is best known for her work on the Roy adaptation model of nursing. Roy has been named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing and the Massachusetts Registered Nurses Association (Roy, 2009). Roy has written many nursing theory books, as well as articles.
Roy's goal of nursing is "the promotion of adaptation in each of the four modes, thereby contributing to the person's health, quality of life and dying with dignity"(Roy,2009). These include the physiologic mode, the self-concept mode, the role function mode, and the interdependence mode. The goal of nursing is to promote adaptation during health and illness of all four modes. Adaptation is described as the process and outcome whereby thinking and feeling persons, as individuals and groups, use conscious awareness and choice to create human and environmental integration (Hood and Leddy).
Basic to Roy’s model are three concepts: the human being, adaptation, and nursing. The human being functions as a bio-psychosocial individual. The goal of the human being is adaptation thru interacting with the environment.
According to Roy(2009), the application of nursing requires much more than merely administering drugs and treatments; rather, the overall concentration of nursing is based significantly more within the psychological components of the patient/caregiver relationship than most people realize. In its purest form, Roy's holistic approach seeks to treat the entire being as a single entity. The nurse strives to achieve wellness in the most natural manner possible and therefore relaxation/support modalities such as acupuncture, meditating, and massage fit well in terms of overall patient treatment.

Individuals, family, communities are capable of affecting their environment and letting it affect and expand their capabilities at the same time. For example a person does not have to accept that they will be diagnosed with breast cancer, or lung disease. A change in diet, exercise, decreasing stress and not smoking will allow them to alter their future. The public has gradually neglected or given up their ability to protect themselves against disease. If we protect ourselves and our bodies against these diseases we may not develop them. If we do develop a disease or cancer our bodies will be in better shape to deal with the disease. If a patient is in pain due to metastatic bone cancer for example, using techniques such as imagery, or mediation could work better than pain medications. These techniques would also have less side effects.
The Roy Adaptation Theory gives nursing a new perspective. Instead of pushing pills each shift, we can help our patients on a more personal bedside manner. Nursing needs to transform back to the way nursing use to be. When nurses “cared “ for their patients, sat and talked to them, used techniques such as distraction instead of giving pain medications first. This theory if put to use could help many patients and families.

Reference Hood, L., & Leddy,S. (2010). Leddy and Pepper's Conceptual Bases of Professional Nursing (7th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Roy, C. (2010). Assessment and the Roy Adaptation Model. (M. Ito, Trans.). Journal of Japan Society of Nursing Diagnosis, 15(1), 35-41. Roy, C. (2009). The Roy Adaptation Model, 3rd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Health.