Nursing Clients Toward Health: An Analysis of Nursing Interventions

Abstract

For the past several years, the School of Nursing at McGill University, has been involved in the development of a model for practice in which health promotion is one of its salient features. This model has been referred to as Situation-Responsive nursing (Allen, 1977). Several nursing demonstrations were established in the 1970's for the purpose of implementing the model of situation-responsive nursing and further describing its characteristics'. One such characteristic has been the identification of the types of interventions nurses use in working with clients on health-related situations2. This paper will briefly discuss the work that has been done on identifying those interventions associated with health-related issues. The first headway made in the area of interventions was the development of a classification system of nursing strategies identified from nurses in three family practice settings. This system was developed as part of a larger project which evaluated this model of nursing in one demonstration setting and compared this model of nursing to the nursing taking place in two comparable settings (Allen, Smith and Gottlieb, 1980). Nineteen major types of interventions, along with their sub-types were identified and subsequently used to differentiate between interventions that were associated with health, as opposed to illness-related concerns. Further work on interventions was derived from analysis of data collected on the practices of nurses at the second demonstration known as The Workshop _ A Health Resource3. The Workshop, as it became known, was an autonomous nursing service established in a middle-class suburb of Montreal. The reason for establishing this service outside the existing health care system was to give nurses an opportunity to more fully explore their role as facilitators and promoters of health (Allen &. Warner, 1978).