Holistic care in the critical care setting: application of a concept through Watson's and Orem's theories of nursing.

For the critical care nurse, two concerns increase the complexity of competent nursing care. First, the intrusion of technology into the critical care environment is more conducive to the use of the medical model than to a nursing theoretical framework. Technology has quantified body functions that were once elusive to man, enabling practitioners to treat dysfunction and disease. Technology, which has provided health care equipment that can maintain breathing, circulation and other important quantifiers of life, is welcomed by a society that fears finality. Second, the critical care nurse must remain cognizant that technology cannot care for the whole being who is in a health care crisis. Holistic caring, the being-with, the empathy, the interconnected experience of need and response within a nursing theoretical framework is the nurse's art. It is this art of caring that is the qualifier of life. It is the balance of technological competency with the art of nursing that promotes adaptations in health crises. Application of holistic caring through established nursing theories such as Watson's theory of nursing and Orem's theory of nursing enable the critical care nurse to acquire an expert level of nursing care.