Riehl’s Interactionist Model of Nursing

Abstract

The models of nursing so far described offer nurses a variety of approaches to the planning and delivery of patient care. However, to a greater or lesser extent, they have certain features in common, in that they emphasise the existence of bodily, psychological and social systems within people which influence behaviour. In recent years a number of nurses have begun to criticise models such as these for being too mechanistic in their identification of human needs. It has been argued, for example, that drawing an analogy between a human being and a machine with parts and systems within it, is likely to dehumanise the process of nursing itself. Instead such critics have argued for the development of nursing models which take as their starting point the human ability to reason and act in ways that are meaningful.