What is Kolcaba’s comfort theory?
Between the year 1900 and 1929, comfort care was the goal for both medicine and nursing. Patient’s recovery was thought to be due to comfort. However, the focus on comfort care seemed to decline and it was only retained for patients’ at the end of life, with no other treatment options obtainable (March & McCormack, 2009). Kolcaba developed her comfort theory after conducting a concept analysis of comfort that examined literature from medicine, nursing, psychology, psychiatry, ergonomics and English. Form the analysis, it had confirmed that comfort care is a positive concept and it is highly associated with activities that nurture and strengthen patients’.
Kolcaba had developed a theoretical framework for the work on comfort in nursing, conceptualizing suitable care as the immediate and holistic experience of feeling strengthened by meeting the needs of three types of comfort know as relief, ease and transcendence in the four contexts of holistic human experience such as physical, psychospiritual, social-cultural and environmental (Kolcaba, 1994; Kolcaba, 1995; Kolcaba & Fox, 1999 & Kolcaba, et. al. 2006). In Kolcaba’s theoretical description, she had raise the consideration of comfort needs, the design of comfort measures to meet those
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It was a middle-range theory for healthcare practice. In year 1994, Kolcaba published the first article on comfort theory and in year 2001, there were subsequent articles that had been published. Kolcaba had developed the ‘Theory of Comfort’ by conducting a concept analysis of comfort by examine literature from multiple disciplines such as nursing, medicine, ergonomics and psychology. According to Kolcaba, in nursing the product of holistic care in ‘Comfort’. A taxonomic framework was formed to guide assessment, measurement and evaluation of patient comfort by having three forms of comfort and four contexts in which comfort can