Theorist

An article by Kumar (2019) stated that for an organization to function well, it must be governed by processes instead of people and that a process is simply a “setup defined by activities that are carried out in which it consumes the input and uses resources that are supervised to create defined output”. Processes are important in almost everything as it gives a step-by-step guide to particular tasks. A process is present in almost every scenario and can be observed in very simple tasks such as dressing up for complex operations. A nurse’s role is to give aid and care to patients to attain the recovery that the patient needs, but along with the aid that the nurses provide the patients, there are obstacles that nurses must deal with to attain the full recovery of the patient. Without a proper plan, one cannot easily address the problem and with that, Ida Jean Orlando, a nurse, developed her theory called the deliberative nursing process theory that is now considered fundamental to all nursing operations. But before we tackle the theory, let us discuss Ida Jean Orlando's life and how her theory was born.

Early Life

Ida Jean Orlando was a first-generation Irish American born on August 12, 1926, in New York, she is the fourth daughter of the six children of Nicholas and Antoinette Orlando who were both Italian immigrants. She was raised during the great depression, and she wanted to study but along with that, an obstacle appeared which was due to Italian culture. She wasn't allowed to leave home until she was married but soon, she had permission to leave and when she did, she started her nursing education at New York Medical College’s flower fist avenue hospital school of nursing and obtained her diploma in 1947. 

Career and Appointments 

Ida Jean Orlando worked as a nurse practitioner, consultant, researcher, and educator throughout her career. Orlando, a clinical nurse, and researcher devoted her life to mental health and psychiatric nursing.

Orlando started to work at Shore Road hospital where she did not feel that the patients were receiving good care and left to work at another hospital. After leaving the hospital, she studied at St. John's University in Brooklyn, New York, and received her Bachelor of Science degree in public health nursing in 1951 she entered public health nursing because she felt that it would give her more freedom to practice nursing in a way that she relied less on protocol and more on the real needs of the patients. When she found out that this was not true, Orlando studied again at Teachers College in Columbia University, New York, and earned a Master of Arts degree in mental health nursing in 1954 and immediately secured a position at Yale University in the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing (PMH) department as an associate professor and director and she stayed there until 1961. While at Yale, Ida started a research project called Integration of Mental Health Concepts in a Basic Nursing Curriculum. With that becoming the steppingstone for her theory to be born, she wrote in report form until a completed version was published in 1961, emphasizing that nurses must prioritize the needs of the patient rather than the protocol.