IDA JEAN (ORLANDO) PELLETIER
         Dynamic Nurse-Patient Relationship

• A first generation American of Italian descent was born 1926
• First nursing theorists to write about the nursing process
• Received nursing diploma at New York Medical College
• Graduate of BS in public nursing at St. John’s University, New York
• MA in mental health nursing  at Columbia University, New York
• Associate professor at Yale School of Nursing and Director of the Graduate Program in Mental Health Psychiatric Nursing.
• Project investigator of National Institute of Mental Health grant entitled: Integration of Mental Health Concepts in a Basic Nursing Curriculum.
• A board member of Harvard Community Health Plan, and serve as both a national and international consultant.
• Married to Robert Pelletier and lives in Boston area.
• She passed away on November 28, 2007.

Summary of the theory

  Orlando published the “Dynamic Nurse-Patient Relationship” (1961). Her purpose is to contribute to concern about the nurse-patient relationship, the nurse’s professional role and identity, and the knowledge development distinct to nursing.

Orlando’s nursing theory stresses the reciprocal relationship between patient and nurse. What the nurse and the patient say and do affects them both. Orlando views the professional function of nursing as finding out and meeting the patient’s immediate need for help. This function is fulfilled when the nurse finds out and meets a patient’s immediate need for help. She was one of the first nursing leaders to identify and emphasize the elements of nursing process and the critical importance of the patient’s participation in the nursing process.

Concepts

  Orlando states that human/person is an individual in need. Unique individual behaving verbally and nonverbally. Assumption is that individuals are at times able to meet their own needs and at other times unable to do so. Thus, human/person cannot survive alone we need each other to survive in our life’s. Orlando assumes environment as a nursing situation that occurs when there is a nurse-patient contact and that both nurse and patient perceive, think, and feel. It says that nurses should provide clean surroundings for their patients because it will affect the health of the patient. And for her, nursing is responsive to individuals who suffer or anticipate a sense of helplessness. Nurses should know how to take care and understand the needs of the patient. Health for her is a sense of adequacy or well-being.

APPRECIATION

I appreciate the work of Ida Jean Orlando-Pelletier “dynamic nurse-patient relationship”. She clearly stated in her work that when providing care, nursing action can be done either autonomic or deliberative. She stated also in her theory that the role of a nurse is to find out and meet the patient’s immediate need for help. Therefore, nurses need to use their perceptions, thoughts about the perception or the feeling engendered from their thoughts to explore with patients behavior. In my nursing profession, Ida Jean Orlando-Pelletiers work is very much appreciated, it gives me more knowledge about my nursing profession on how I am going to be a more effective nurse. It gives me an idea on how to deal with my patients and on how to treat them well. For me, Orlando must have gone through a lot of experience for her to write this very inspiring and knowledgeable book. I am really grateful to her because she had imparted me through her theory the ideas I need to become a nurse that would be responsible enough to deal and to help those patients who suffer great pain and emotional pain as well. Orlando opens my mind to see things more clearly, for Orlando’s theory focuses on how a nurse should be broadminded and how to understand the needs of a patient. She emphasizes that it is crucial for nurses to share their thoughts, feelings and perceptions so they can determine whether their inferences are the same with the patients needs. For sometimes, patients patient’s experience distress or feeling of helplessness because they have physical limitations and have a negative reactions to the environment.

            Orlando’s theory will always remain one of the most effective practice that will help us especially to those new nurses like me as we begin our journey in medical practice.

Bibliography

• NURSING THEORY (7th Edition) By: Martha Raile Alligood & Ann Marriner Tomey
•  http://nursingtheories.blogspot.com/2008/07/close-encounter-orlandos-dynamic-nurse.html