Caring: Essential to Nursing

2082 Words9 Pages
Caring: Essential to nursing
Nursing has advanced in many ways since the era of Florence Nightingale's environmental theory, Dorothea Orem's self-care theory, and Suchman's Stages of illness theory. However, each theorist has helped to develop nursing for practicing nursing professionals today. In regard to the many theorists’ influence on nursing, the fundamental building block is caring. Jean Watson's philosophy on caring caused her to consider the correlation between human caring and nursing (Watson, 1999). Jean Watson developed many writings expressing her philosophy to integrate human caring into the science of nursing. The three major principles appeared consistently throughout her texts were the transpersonal caring relationship, the caring occasion/caring moment, and the carative factors that represent feelings with action (Lachman, 2012). According to Alligood (2010), “Watson defines caring as the ethical and moral ideal of nursing that has interpersonal and humanistic qualities" (pp. 111). Caring is an ethical code that fits into the therapeutic interventions that nurses incorporate into their plan of care (Watson, 1999). Watson's care model is not void intellect or the physiological aspect. The complexity of this model exists when nurses think they have to integrate caring into every intervention while remembering to carry out doctor’s orders but remaining efficient with his or her nursing clinical skills. If one would scrutinize Watson's theory on caring, one would infer that caring is not a skill that instructors can teach, it has to come from the human spirit within.
Watson composed a work, Caring Science as Sacred Science, of her personal journey of healing from a distressing time in her life. In this book, Watson mimics Florence Nightingale in her beliefs that nursing encompasses a spiritual side; a "calling" is what Nightingale

More about Caring: Essential to Nursing

Open Document