King’s Theory and Nursing Process

My institution, Overlake Hospital has a multidisciplinary diabetes inpatient team that include, endocrinologists, diabetes specialist podiatrist, nurses, wound care specialist, dietitian and social workers. Often patients expressed their concern and fear over not being able to self-manage their condition. Lack of knowledge on how to treat, lack of understanding of proper food choices, exercise regimen and overwhelming burden of this chronic disease causes depression. Our interdisciplinary team focuses on care for each and every individual’s complex need and educate, train and support them so that they feel confident in managing their own when they discharge home.

While patients are in our care, it is our responsibility to look into holistic components that these patients and help meet their need.

As a mother of Type I diabetic, a nurse and a diabetic educator(volunteer) diabetes education interests me the most. For this reason, I have chosen to research on nursing theories that help guide individuals diagnosed with DM who seeks medical attention. Through my experience, I have seen that compliance with diabetes care is the biggest issue among individuals. Many theories provide guidance for nurses on how to support these patients. This paper will demonstrate King’s theory of goal attainment that can be applied to the care of the adult with DM and Dorothy Orem’s self-care model to improve quality of life with these individuals. Our unit focuses on King’s theory of goal attainment. However, in my opinion Dorothy Orem’s self-care model will also be equally beneficial for these individuals. This paper will explain more on these theories.

Description of theories

Imogene King (1923-2007) was a pioneer of nursing theory development. In 1981 she introduced a middle-range theory known as Theory of Goal attainment (TGA), which was used to enhance communication and shared decision-making for nurse-client dyads. The main concepts in the TGA are perception, communication, interaction, transaction, self, role, growth, development, stressors, time and space(King, 1992). The theory of goal attainment describes the nature of nurse-client mutual interaction lead to goal attainment. In this case nurse first assess client’s concerns, problems, perception where client cooperate and collaborate into with nurse to set desirable goals (King, 1992).

Nurses involved in the education of diabetic patients can incorporate this concept of mutual goal setting and planning through the use of King’s theory of goal attainment. This paper presents King’s theory and applies it to the care of the diabetic in the inpatients and outpatient setting. There are many advantages of King’s theory such as it is easy to implement in inpatient and outpatient settings,  this theory does not involve in many complex steps. King’s theory of goal attainment provides a useful framework for the care of the diabetic patient. This paper has demonstrated that King’s theory can be applied using the nursing process.

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