Application of Nursing Theory – Jean Watson’s Theory of Human Caring
According to Watson’s theory, “Nursing is concerned with promoting health, preventing illness, caring for the sick, and restoring health.” It focuses on health promotion, as well as the treatment of diseases. According to Watson, caring is central to nursing practice and promotes health better than a simple medical cure.
The nursing model also states that caring can be demonstrated and practiced by nurses. Caring for patients promotes growth; a caring environment accepts a person as he or she is, and looks to what he or she may become.
Assumptions
Watson’s model makes seven assumptions: (1) Caring can be effectively demonstrated and practiced only interpersonally. (2) Caring consists of carative factors that result in the satisfaction of certain human needs. (3) Effective caring promotes health and individual or family growth. (4) Caring responses accept the patient as he or she is now, as well as what he or she may become. (5) A caring environment is one that offers the development of potential while allowing the patient to choose the best action for him or herself at a given point in time. (6) A science of caring is complementary to the science of curing. (7) The practice of caring is central to nursing.
Major Concepts
The Philosophy and Science of Caring has four major concepts: human being, health, environment or society, and nursing.
Society
Society provides the values that determine how one should behave and what goals one should strive toward. Watson states:
“Caring (and nursing) has existed in every society. Every society has had some people who have cared for others. A caring attitude is not transmitted from generation to generation by genes. It is transmitted by the culture of the profession as a unique way of coping with its environment.”
Human being
Human being is a valued person to be cared for, respected, nurtured, understood, and assisted; in general a philosophical view of a person as a fully functional integrated self. Human is viewed as greater than and different from the sum of his or her parts.
Health
Health is the unity and harmony of the mind, body, and soul; health is associated with the degree of congruence between the self as perceived and the self as experienced. It is defined as a high level of overall physical, mental, and social functioning; a general adaptive-maintenance level of daily functioning; and the absence of illness, or the presence of efforts leading to the absence of illness.
Nursing
Nursing is a human science of persons and human health-illness experiences that are mediated by professional, personal, scientific, esthetic, and ethical human care transactions.
Actual Caring Occasion
Actual caring occasion involves actions and choices by the nurse and the individual. The moment of coming together in a caring occasion presents the two persons with the opportunity to decide how to be in the relationship – what to do with the moment.
Transpersonal
The transpersonal concept is an intersubjective human-to-human relationship in which the nurse affects and is affected by the person of the other. Both are fully present in the moment and feel a union with the other; they share a phenomenal field that becomes part of the life story of both.
Subconcepts
Phenomenal field
The totality of human experience of one’s being in the world. This refers to the individual’s frame of reference that can only be known to that person.
Self
The organized conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of the “I” or “ME” and the perceptions of the relationship of the “I” and “ME” to others and to various aspects of life.
Time
The present is more subjectively real and the past is more objectively real. The past is prior to, or in a different mode of being than the present, but it is not clearly distinguishable. Past, present, and future incidents merge and fuse.
