Week 4 (Class 1) - Becoming a Nurse IV: Strengths-based care - What do it look like? Flashcards
What are strengths?
They can be biological, psychological, and/or social realms
- Sources of power or engird that reside in a person
- Not an opposite of weaknesses - they exist with them
- Capacities, capacities, competencies, skills
- Promote health, healing, and recovering
- How a person lives, quality of life
- Coping, new purpose
Language of strengths
- The language we use?
- Nursing care?
May not use it when describing themselves
- Other descriptors that synonymous with strength (i.e. resilience, energy) or metaphors (i.e. beating the odds, I’m still standing, I’m going to fight this)
- These describe strength qualities
Nursing care:
- Using ways to capture strengths
- Asking questions - how can we work together, what challenges have you experienced, what helps you get through that, resources, etc.
Where do strengths come from?
- Talent
- Knowledge
- Skills
- Practice
(Refer to readings)
“You don’t know how strong you are until strong is your only option”
What is embedded in strengths-based care?
This weeks readings
- Relationships between strengths
- Potentials
- Resources
- Resiliency
An approach used in nursing
- Help to uncover/explore strengths and development but we don’t decide nor implement
What do strengths look like?
- Are developing entities
- Can be learned
- Coexist with weaknesses and vulnerabilities
- Are related to goals
- Are defined by the context and circumstance
- Are multidimensional
- Can be depleted and replenished
- Are transferable
- Are personal constructions
What are the classification of strengths?
- How does this translate into nursing practice?
Gottlieb provides examples of several classification systems:
- Discipline specific
- Guide the main mission of that discipline
- Grouping strengths needed for our work
Translates to practice:
- Nurses must focus on knowing the person and family, what is important to them, what they want to achieve
- Strengths come in many forms
- Understanding the person and family have potentials
- Key to the person health and healing, recovery
- Understand that they need to have/develop personal strengths to practice SBC
What is deficit based care?
Focuses on illness and diagnosis
- Focusing on “doing to”
Narrow focus
Compare deficit and strengths based care:
- Distinguishing features
Gottlieb page 25.
How does assessment shift in strengths based approach?
Problems to goals, dreams, aspirations and strengths
Functional deficits to functional abilities
Problems with leisure lifestyle to leisure facilitators
Behaviour problems to social competence
Depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions to positive emotions
Stressors to relaxers and soothers
Social isolation and loneliness to social resources/networks and community mapping
Family deficits and problems to family strengths, dreams, and goals; family traditions; shared family interests and activities
“How to colour a situation?”
“If we ask people to look for deficits, they will usually find them, and their view of the situation will be coloured by this.”
“If we ask people to look for successes, they will usually find it, and their view of the situation will be coloured by this.”
Kral (1989)
How to build a strengths based picture?
- Reason client is seeking care
- Past history/present health status
- Family/significant others
- Home/work (ADLs)
- Medications
- Faith/spiritual
- Financial
Case Example:
- Dennis (23y) involved in motorcycle collision which resulted in traumatic BTK amputation of his (R) leg
- What following systems/problems would a typical priority nursing foci include?
Impaired respiratory function
Pain/phantom pain
Impaired mobility
Risk for impaired skin integrity
Alter self-concept
What possible strengths might you uncover with the questions you ask?
- Attitude
- Sleep
- Wellness
- Feelings
- Mental
What makes an assessment strengths based?
- Be flexible and perceptive of an individuals situation and needs.
- Follow a holistic/whole-person approach
- Be professional, honest, open, and approachable
What makes an assessment strengths based?
- Be flexible and perceptive of an individuals situation and needs.
- Follow a holistic/whole-person approach
- Be professional, honest, open, and approachable
