Callista Roy
Callista Roy is a prominent nursing theorist known for developing the Roy Adaptation Model, which fundamentally transformed the nursing profession by redefining the role of nurses in patient care. Born in 1939, Roy was influenced by her devout Catholic upbringing and her mother's work as a nurse, which instilled in her a deep sense of compassion and service. After earning a bachelor's degree in nursing from Mount St. Mary's College, she pursued advanced degrees in pediatric nursing and sociology at UCLA, believing that understanding social interactions was essential to nursing.
In 1976, she published the Roy Adaptation Model, which emphasizes that health and illness are part of a continuum and that nurses should treat the whole person, considering physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects. This model has been widely adopted in various nursing fields, promoting a more holistic approach to patient care. Throughout her career, Roy has contributed significantly to nursing education and research, receiving numerous accolades, including the Martha E. Rogers Award and recognition as a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing. Her work continues to impact nursing theory and practice, emphasizing compassionate care and the importance of adapting to each patient's unique situation.
Callista Roy
Nursing professor and theorist
- Born: October 14, 1939
- Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California
- Education: Mount St. Mary’s University; University of California, Los Angeles
- Significance: A researcher into the relationship between nurse and patient, Callista Roy pioneered a landmark paradigm, now called the Roy Adaptation Model, that redefined the role of the nurse in treatment protocols.
Background
Callista Lorraine Roy was born in 1939 on the feast day of Saint Callistus I, who rose from enslavement to become Pope, and for whom she was named. Her parents were devout Roman Catholics; her mother, a nurse in a city hospital in Los Angeles, California, raised Roy to appreciate the importance of selfless service and the need for compassion. Roy often accompanied her mother to the hospital, and, at age fourteen, Roy volunteered to work in the hospital’s kitchen; within a year, she was working with patients as a nurse’s aide. She loved the interaction with patients and knew early on she would become a nurse.
A precocious student and avid reader, Roy matriculated at nearby Mount St. Mary’s College (now University), an all-women’s Catholic liberal arts college that stressed the importance of community service. By the time she graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, she had undergone a significant religious experience. In 1958, she had joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, whose members had pioneered health care services for more than a century, staffing hospitals, rest homes, and orphanages. Completing a master’s in pediatric nursing at UCLA in 1966, Roy decided to expand her expertise by pursuing first a master’s and then a doctorate (1975) in sociology, also at UCLA. She was certain that sociology, with its emphasis on how the individual is defined by interaction with larger communities, was crucial to understanding the nature of how patients cope with illness, the core mission of a nurse.
After completing her doctoral work, Roy taught at Mount Saint Mary’s and the University of Portland until 1983 and was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. She helped establish a master's degree program in nursing in Portland. In 1987, she became a professor and resident nurse theorist at the Boston College School of Nursing. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to study in Australia in 1989.
Roy worked as an administrator and nurse at hospitals in Tucson, Arizona, and Lewiston, Idaho, before she joined the Mount St. Mary's faculty in 1996. She was on the Board of the International Network for Doctoral Education from 2003 to 2006. Roy retired in 2017 from the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College in Massachusetts. She moved back to her home state of California.
Roy is the author of numerous articles and books. Among her most significant books are The Roy Adaptation Model (1991) and Generating Middle Range Theory: From Evidence to Practice (2013).
Establishing the Roy Adaptation Model
At the time Roy began her nursing studies, there existed no conceptual model to define the actual role of a nurse; nurses were largely seen as adjuncts to physicians. Roy’s groundbreaking work in nursing theory began in 1964 when a professor in her graduate classes, Dorothy E. Johnson, challenged her students to come up with an actual model that would reflect the day-to-day responsibilities of a nurse.
Over the next decade, Roy developed a revolutionary conceptual model that would become known as the Roy Adaptation Model, first published in 1976. Roy began with two fundamental assumptions: first, health and illness were part of the same continuum, a patient did not "get" sick; second, nurses did not treat a patient, nurses treated a person, a complicated cooperative system of parts, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, and that in adapting to the reality of illness, each patient drew on all four levels. Roy concluded then that a nurse, to be both effective and compassionate, needed to design a response program to each individual patient that in turn recognized these different levels of adaptation, or response, systems that worked in cooperation with the others. Under this system, patients were seen as more complex than nursing theory to that time had advanced; their treatment demanded that the nurse recognize the vital role of the patient’s self-concept as well as their perception of their family, friends, and ultimately God.
In short, Roy was instrumental in advancing the human factor in nursing. Roy theorized that the appropriate goal of a nurse was to assist the patient in adapting to the onset of illness and its continuing impact. In gathering data on patient care across more than three decades, Roy showed that patients responded positively to encouragement, clear direction, honesty, and interpersonal communication and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to change, adapting to the reality of illness. The nurse provided day-to-day, direct and clear stimuli.
Roy’s model, as it evolved across four decades of research, came to endorse six levels of response that collectively provided patients with integrated care. First, the nurse observes patient behavior, creating a patient profile grounded in measurable data; second, the nurse observes stimuli, or protocols, that clearly had no evident impact on the patient’s health status—that is, the nurse observes (and rejects) what does not work for the patient; third, the nurse, in close communication with the attending physicians, creates a patient profile that diagnoses why such protocols proved ineffective; fourth, the nurse sets reasonable, achievable goals for charting the patient’s adaptation to the illness; fifth, the nurse executes the actual interventions, beginning to apply the selected protocols as a way to direct the patient’s adaptation program; and sixth, the nurse must continually evaluate the efficacy of the designated protocols—what is working and what is not—as a way to enhance and encourage short- and long-term recovery.
Impact
Roy’s theoretical premise—that a patient is a complex individual who responds to the challenge of illness on multiple levels—has become a working assumption in contemporary nursing practice. Her model has been applied to a variety of nursing fields, from pediatric care to hospice work, as well as both short-term care and long-term rehabilitation protocols. In short, Roy redefined the concept of the nursing profession. She continues her research in the dynamics of coping with illness, as well as lecturing, helping universities around the world develop nursing school curricula, and teaching graduate courses in nursing theory. Her tireless efforts to promote the concept of compassionate care have made her one of the most recognized scholars in her field. The National League for Nursing honored her with the Martha E. Rogers Award in 1991, the same year she established the organization that became the Roy Adaptation Association. In 2007, the American Academy of Nursing named her a Living Legend, the organization’s highest honor. She was one of ten inaugural inductees into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame in 2010.
Bibliography
Akinsanya, Justus A. The Roy Adaptation Model in Action. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Print.
Alligood, Martha Raile. Nursing Theorists and Their Work. 8th ed. St. Louis: Mosby, 2013. Print.
Alligood, Martha Raile, and Ann Marriner-Tomey. Nursing Theory: Utilization and Application. 5th ed. St. Louis: Mosby, 2013. Print.
"Celebrating Sr. Callista Roy's Career." Boston College Connell School of Nursing, 4 June 2018, www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/cson/about/cson-news/2018-news-archive/CelebratingSrCallistaRoy.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
Frederickson, Keville. "Callista Roy’s Adaptation Model." Nursing Science Quarterly 24.4 (2011): 301–3. Print.
Morrow, Mary R., and Callista Roy. "A Nurse Theorist's Life of Providence: A Dialogue with Sister Callista Roy." Nurse Science Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3, 2022, doi: 10.1177/08943184221092439. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
"Sister Callista Roy—Nursing Theorist." Nursing Theory, nursing-theory.org/nursing-theorists/Sister-Callista-Roy.php. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
Sitzman, Kathleen, and Lisa Wright Eichelberger. Understanding the Work of Nursing Theorists: A Creative Beginning. 3rd ed. Burlington: Jones, 2017. Print.
"Sr. Callista Roy, PhD, RN, FAAN." Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing. Trustees of Boston College, 20 July 2016. Web. 28 Aug. 2016.
Sullivan, Kathleen. "A Vision for Nursing." Boston College News, 20 July 2016, www.bc.edu/bc-web/bcnews/science-tech-and-health/nursing/roy-adaptation-model.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
Vera, Matt. "Sister Callista L. Roy." Nurselabs. Nurselabs, 18 Aug. 2014. Web. 28 Aug. 2016.