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Martha Elizabeth rogers

(1914-1994)

Born in Dallas, Texas, on May 12, 1914. Rogers was the eldest f four children of

Bruce and Lucy. She found Kindergarten to be “terribly

exciting” and had a love and passion for books that was fostered by her parents.

She was well acquainted with the public library and started reading eight books at a time.

Rogers already knew the Greek alphabet by age 10. By the sixth grade, she already finished reading all 20 volumes of The Child’s Book of Knowledge and was into the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Martharogers

Attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville from 1931 to 1933, Rogers entered the Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing, receiving her diploma in 1936, and earned a bachelor of science degree from George Peabody College, Nashville, in 1937.

She was employed as a public health nurse in Michigan from 1937 to 1939, and as a member of the staff of the Hartford, Connecticut Visiting Nurses Association from 1940 to 1945.

Martharogers

After receiving a master of arts degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1945, she accepted the position of executive director of the Phoenix Visiting Nurse Association in Arizona, where she remained for six years.

In 1952, she received a master's degree in public health and in 1954, a doctor of science degree, both from Johns Hopkins University.

Martharogers

In 1954, Rogers was appointed professor of nursing and head of the Division of Nursing at New York University.

Rogers was honored with numerous awards and citations for her sustained contributions to nursing and science. In 1996, she was posthumously inducted into the American Nurses Association’s Hall of Fame.

Martharogers

Rogers died on March 13, 1994 and was buried in Knoxville, Tennessee. She has a memorial placed in the sidewalk near her childhood home in Knoxville.

Martharogers

According to Rogers, the Science of Unitary Human Beings contains two dimensions: the science of nursing, which is the knowledge specific to the field of nursing that comes from scientific research; and the art of nursing, which involves using the science of nursing creatively to help better the life of the patient.

Philosophical underpinnings of the study

(1) Man is a unified whole possessing his own integrity and manifesting characteristics that are more than and different from the sum of his parts. (2) Man and environment are continuously exchanging matter and energy with one another. (3) The life process evolves irreversibly and unidirectionally along the space-time continuum. (4) Pattern and organization identify man and reflect his innovative wholeness. And lastly, (5) Man is characterized by the capacity for abstraction and imagery, language and thought, sensation and emotion.

Assumptions

Health

Rogers defines health as an expression of the life process. It is the characteristics and behavior coming from the mutual, simultaneous interaction of the human and environmental fields, and health and illness are part of the same continuum.Major Concepts

Nursing

It is the study of unitary, irreducible, indivisible human and environmental fields: people and their world.

Major Concepts

Scope of Nursing

Nursing aims to assist people in achieving their maximum health potential. Maintenance and promotion of health, prevention of disease, nursing diagnosis, intervention, and rehabilitation encompass the scope of nursing’s goals.Major Concepts

Environmental Field

“An irreducible, indivisible, pandimensional energy field identified by pattern and integral with the human field.”

Major Concepts

Energy Field

The energy field is the fundamental unit of both the living and the non-living. It provides a way to view people and the environment as irreducible wholes. The energy fields continuously vary in intensity, density, and extent.

Major Concepts

Openness

There are no boundaries that stop energy flow between the human and environmental fields, which is the openness in Rogers’ theory.

Subconcepts

Pandimensional

Pan-dimensionality is defined as “non-linear domain without spatial or temporal attributes.”

Subconcepts

Pattern

Rogers defined pattern as the distinguishing characteristic of an energy field seen as a single wave. It is an abstraction, and gives identity to the field.

Subconcepts

Principles of Homeodynamics

Homeodynamics should be understood as a dynamic version of homeostasis (a relatively steady state of internal operation in the living system).

Subconcepts

Principle of Reciprocy

Postulates the inseparability of man and environment and predicts that sequential changes in life process are continuous, probabilistic revisions occurring out of the interactions between man and environment.

Subconcepts

Principle of Synchrony

This principle predicts that change in human behavior will be determined by the simultaneous interaction of the actual state of the human field and the actual state of the environmental field at any given point in space-time.

Subconcepts

Principle of Integrality (Synchrony + Reciprocy)

Because of the inseparability of human beings and their environment, sequential changes in the life processes are continuous revisions occurring from the interactions between human beings and their environment.

Subconcepts

Principle of Resonancy

It speaks to the nature of the change occurring between human and environmental fields. The life process in human beings is a symphony of rhythmical vibrations oscillating at various frequencies

Subconcepts

Principle of Helicy

The human-environment field is a dynamic, open system in which change is continuous due to the constant interchange between the human and environment.

Subconcepts

The nursing process has three steps in Rogers’ Theory of Unitary Human Beings: assessment, voluntary mutual patterning, and evaluation.

Science of Unitary Human Beings and Nursing Process

Areas of assessment are: the total pattern of events at any given point in space-time, simultaneous states of the patient and his or her environment, rhythms of the life process, supplementary data, categorical disease entities, subsystem pathology, and pattern appraisal.

Science of Unitary Human Beings and Nursing Process

Mutual patterning of the human and environmental fields includes:

sharing knowledge offering choices empowering the patient fostering patterning evaluation repeat pattern appraisal, which includes

nutrition, work/leisure activities, wake/sleep cycles, relationships, pain, and fear/hopes

identify dissonance and harmony validate appraisal with the patient self-reflection for the patient

Science of Unitary Human Beings and Nursing Process

Rogers’ concepts provide a worldview from which nurses may derive theories and hypotheses and propose relationships specific to different situations.

Rogers’ theory is not directly testable due to lack of concrete hypotheses, but it is testable in principle.

Strengths

Rogers’ model does not define particular hypotheses or theories for it is an abstract, unified, and highly derived framework.

Testing the concepts’ validity is questionable because its concepts are not directly measurable.

The theory was believed to be profound, and was too ambitious because the concepts are extremely abstract.

Weakness

Rogers claimed that nursing exists to serve people, however, nurses’ roles were not clearly defined.

The purpose of nurses is to promote health and well-being for all persons wherever they are. However, Rogers’ model has no concrete definition of health state.Weakness