OPINION: Self-care – a new nursing process

I know that I should probably have written some stirring articles in January about “new starts, new you” and those types of posts. January is one of the darkest months – literally.

Then we have the post festive season come down and that there are still a good two months of British winter to get through. It’s never the ideal time to start new habits and new beginnings.

However, after my brush with pneumonia last month I have been reviewing my self-care plans. It seemed to take very little time to become unbelievably sick so I really need to check in with myself and see if I can prevent the same happening again.

Conclusion

I have been reflecting on how I view self-care and have come to the conclusion that I need to set out two specific areas, self-care and repair.

I feel that I need to think of my own wellbeing like a nursing care plan. What do I want to achieve with self-care? Is it to maintain my current levels of health, or to be working towards improvements?

It made me think of the medical nursing model. Where the purpose is to enable the patient to return to the health they had before the health intervention was needed. But with self-care is that enough? Should I not be considering recovering from illness as a “repair” period of self-care.

Using skills

There is a difference between repair and self-care and I feel I have neglected this. If you are a spoonie like me and live with chronic ill health, I feel the difference is even more important.

If each period of illness detracts from my overall wellness, then I need to spend time ensuring a good level of repair from each illness and then looking to prevent a repeat episode and improve my health longer term.

I find that being objective about my health and using the skills I have learned to assess our patients can be beneficial. I have previously written about using Roper, Logan and Tierney to check in on my overall health and I wonder if a new nursing model is in order.

Maybe not quite a contextualised care model but one that does allow for the individual to be considered to have future improvements in their health and well-being.