Rubric for nursing Theorist Teaching project - Essay Example

Kolcaba defines several levels of comfort that appear for patients over time. She defines three forms of comfort and four contexts where patients will find comfort. The three levels she defines are “relief, ease and transcendence” (March &McCormack, 2009, p. 76-77). The first level of comfort, relief, happens when a patient is provided with what they need when they are in pain. The patient will move to the ease level when they find out that not only are they having relief from pain, but this relief is continuing over time because of the way that they have relieved the pain.

The patient will move to the transcendence phase, when they are able to move past the challenges they have and life a fulfilling life (Kolcaba, 2011). Kolcaba saw that these phases were appearing in much of the literature she was reading on the subject and she began to formulate her theory. When developing a theory, it is important to know what has come before the theory that one hopes to present (March &McCormack, 2009). Kolcaba began to write about the three levels of comfort that she had identified and realized that there was an important messages to nurses about these stages.

As an example, nurses are supposed to be the ones who provide comfort for the patients in a holistic way; her theory looks at the patient in a holistic way by providing comfort on the physical, emotional and psychosocial levels. Her theory recognizes that each individual has their own need for comfort and there are many different interventions that are needed in these situations (Kolcaba and Kolcaba, 1991). According to Kolcaba (2011) there are four dimensions to the theory. The first dimension describes nursing as the process of interviewing the client about their comfort needs.

In this phase, the patient is provided with interventions and then the nurses check the patient’s comfort level on a regular basis. The second dimension defines the optimal health of the