Self-Care

Welcome to class. Have a seat.

Today, we are going to talk about a concept that seems brilliantly simple on the surface, but mathematically complex once you really look at it: Self-Care.

In the popular vernacular, "self-care" might mean taking a bubble bath or a mental health day. But in the world of professional nursing, self-care is the very physics of human survival and dignity. It is the ability of an organism to maintain its own existence independently.

Let's ground this right away in the fundamental architecture of nursing philosophy. If we want to understand why we care so much about this, we look to Orem’s Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory. Dorothea Orem essentially proposed a basic law of nursing thermodynamics: The patient has an inherent need to maintain autonomy in health management. People want to do things for themselves. When an injury or illness creates a gap between what a person can do and what they need to do, a "self-care deficit" is born. Our job as nurses isn’t to just do everything for them—our job is to bridge that deficit so they can reclaim their autonomy.

But before we can build a bridge, we have to measure the gap.