Theoretical Approaches To Psychiatric Nursing

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Theoretical Approaches to Psychiatric Nursing: The Tidal Model
Happy Gilmore

Theoretical Approaches to Psychiatric Nursing: The Tidal Model Contemporary theoretical approaches to psychiatric nursing reflect the disparate and often conflicting messages inherent in the medical models which have served as a foundation to much of psychiatric nursing in the twentieth century. Many of these theoretical approaches attempt to bridge the divide between the physical and social sciences, demonstrating the difficulty in developing a singular and specific theoretical model that is unique to psychiatric nursing alone (Boyd, 2008). However, although the medical model continues to dominate nursing, the evolution of theoretical approaches to psychiatric nursing practice begun by Hildegard Peplau (1952) with her seminal work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, has both influenced the field's approach to providing positive and compassionate paradigms for patient care and shaped the theoretical aspects of the field. As such, Philip Barker's Tidal Model (2001) builds upon Peplau's focus on the critical relationship between nurse and patient to create an approach that emphasizes the importance of the patient's own narrative and lived-experience in developing a appropriate person-centered care plans. Using the metaphor of the tide to illustrate the "fluid nature of human experience" (Barker, 2001, p. 2), this theoretical model refuses to dictate a 'correct' course for human life experience, instead using the patient's own expectations for and articulation of need to dictate the nurse-patient relationship. Although first developed in order to provide psychiatric nursing with its own specific theoretical model, this approach has since been expanded to include other therapeutic areas as it is based predominantly on the need for care practitioners to acknowledge the patient's

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