MARGARET JEAN HARMAN WATSON

JEAN WATSON

(1940-Present)

THEORY OF TRANSPERSONAL CARING

“We are the light in this institutional darkness, and in this
model we get to return to the light of our humanity”
I. ABOUT THE THEORIST

JEAN WATSON

 She was born on June 10, 1940 in Southern West Virginia and grew up during the
1940’s and 1950’s in the small town of Welch, West Virginia in the Appalachian
Mountains.
 In Colorado, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1964 at the Boulder
campus.
 A Master of Science in Psychiatric-Mental Nursing in 1966 at the Health Sciences
campus.
 A Ph.D. in educational psychology and counseling in 1973 at the Graduate School,
Boulder campus.
 She is a founder if the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of
the American Academy of Nursing.
 She previously served as a Dean of Nursing at the University Health Sciences Center
and is a Past President of the National League for Nursing.
 Watson believes that the main focus in Nursing is on carative factors.

II. CONTENT OF THE THEORY

Watson’s main concepts include the 10 carative factors:

1. The formation of a humanistic-altruistic system of values

 Begins developmentally at an early age with values shared with parents.

 Mediated through one’s own life experiences.

2. The instillation of faith-hope

 Essential to both carative and curative processes

 Provide a sense of well-being through beliefs which are meaningful to the individual

3. The cultivation of sensitivity to one’s self and to others

 Explores the need of the nurse to begin to feel an emotion as it presents itself
 Makes the nurse more authentic, which encourages self-growth and self-actualization
 Nurses promote health and higher level functioning only when forming person to person
relationship

4. Development of a helping-trust relationship

 Strongest tool is the mode of communication, which establishes rapport and caring

CHARACATERISTICS
 Congruence
 Empathy
 Warmth
  Communication includes verbal, non-verbal, and listening in a manner which connotes
empathetic understanding

5. The promotion and acceptance of the expression of positive and negative feelings

 “feelings alter thoughts and behaviour”

 Expressions improves one’s level of awareness
 Awareness of the feelings helps to understand the behaviour it engenders

6. The systematic use of the scientific problem-solving method for decision making

 Only method that allows for control and prediction, and permits self-correction
 The science of caring should not be always neutral and objective

7. The promotion of transpersonal teacher-learning

 Must focus on the learning process as much as the teaching process

 Understanding the person’s perception of the situation

8. The provision of supportive, protective and/or corrective mental, physical, societal, and
spiritual environment

 Divides this into external and internal variables in which the nurse manipulates in order
to provide support and protection for the person’s mental and physical well-being
 The external and internal environments are interdependent
 Nurses also must provide comfort, privacy, and safety as part of this carative factor

9. The assistance with gratification of human needs

 Grounded in a hierarchy of needs similar to that of Maslow’s

 Each need is equally important for quality nursing care and promotion of optimal health.

WATSON’S ORDERING OF NEEDS

 Lower order needs (biophysical needs)

 The need for food and fluid, elimination, and ventilation
 Lower order needs (psychophysical needs)
 The need for activity-inactivity and sexuality
 Higher order needs (psychosocial needs)
 The need for achievement and affiliation
 Higher order needs (intrapersonal-interpersonal need)
 The need for self-actualization

10. The allowance for existential-phenomenological forces

 Phenomenology is the way of understanding people from the way things appear to them
 Existential psychology is the study of human existence using phenomenological analysis
  Helps the nurse to reconcile and mediate the incongruity of viewing the person
holistically
 Nurse assists the person to find the strength or courage to confront life or death

CARATIVE FACTORS TO CLINICAL CARITAS PROCESSES

10 CARITAS PROCESSES PATIENT’S SUBJECTIVE NURSE’S REFLECTIONS
WORLD

III. METAPARADIGM OF THE THEORY

A. NURSING

 Defined as “a human science of people and human health-illness experiences that are
mediated by professional, personal, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical human care
transactions.”
 Nursing consists of knowledge, thought, values, philosophy, commitment, and action,
with some degree of passion
 Nurses are interested in understanding health, illness, and the human experience;
promoting and restoring health; preventing illness

B. PERSON

 A valued person to be cared for, respected, nurtured, understood, and assisted

 She views the person as “a unity of mind/body/spirit/nature”
 Viewed human as greater than, different from, the sum of his parts

C. HEALTH

 Refers to unity and harmony within the mind, body, and soul.
 Associated with the degree of congruence between self as perceived and as experience
 WHO’s definition, includes three (3) elements:
 A high level of over-all physical, mental, and social functioning;
 A general adaptive-maintenance level of daily functioning;
 The absence of illness(or the presence of efforts that lead to its absence)
D. ENVIRONMENT

 Provides the values that determine how one should behave and what goals one should
strive toward
 Nurse’s role in the environment as “attending to supportive, protective, and/or corrective
mental, physical, societal, and spiritual environments”
 She says that “healing spaces can be used to help others transcend illness, pain, and
suffering” emphasizing the environment and person connection

E. MODEL

IV. ACCEPTANCE BY NURSING COMMUNITY

A. PRACTICE

 Watson’s theory has been validated in outpatient, inpatient, and community health
clinical settings and with various populations, including recent applications with attention
to patient care essentials (Pipe et al., 2012), living on ventilator (Lindahl, 2011),
simulating care (Diener & Hobbs, 2012), mothers struggling with mental illness (Blegen,
Eriksson, & Bondas, 2014), and women with infertility (Arslan-Ozkan et al., 2014)

B. EDUCATION

 Watson’s caring has been taught in numerous baccalaureate nursing curricula, including
Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky; Indiana State University in Terre Haute;
Oklahoma City University; and Florida Atlantic University
 In addition, the concepts was used in international nursing programs in Australia, Japan,
Brazil, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, to name a few.
 A study of Watson’s framework leads the reader through an inspiring experience by
emphasizing deep inner reflection and personal growth, communication skills, use of
self-transpersonal growth, attention to both nurse and patient, and the human caring
process that potentiates human health and healing.

C. RESEARCH

 Qualitative, naturalistic, and phenomenological methods have been identified as

particularly relevant to the study of caring and to the development of nursing as a human
science
 Patient outcomes in caring transactions are a potential area for studies.
 Research and practice shall focus both on subjective and objective patient outcomes to
determine whether or not caring is indeed the truest essence of nursing.
V. ANALYSIS TO EVALUATION

A. SIMPLICITY

 Watson’s theory makes use of sophisticated language to put forth subtle thoughts about
caring, and this entails “reading between the lines” to decipher its profound meaning.

B.GENERALITY

 The theory provides moral and philosophical basis for nursing. The scope of the
framework encompasses all aspect of the health-illness continuum. In addition, it
addresses aspects of preventing illness and experiencing a peaceful death, thereby
increasing its generality.

C. EMPIRICAL PRECISION

 Watson’s describe her theory as descriptive; she acknowledges the evolving nature of
the theory and welcomes input from others.

D. DERIVABLE CONSEQUENCES

 Watson’s theory continues to provide a useful and important metaphysical orientation for
the delivery of nursing care.
 Watson’s theoretical concept such as use of self, patient-identified needs, the caring
process, and the spiritual sense of being human, may help nurses and their patients to
find meaning and harmony during a period of increasing complexity.

VI. APPLICATION OF THE THEORY

Nurse Abbie is a senior nurse working in the U.S. Rachel, her best friend from the Philippines
came to visit her for a few months. She is also a nurse, and they both graduated from the same
University in Iloilo. Rachel came to the hospital where Abbie works, and knew that the teaching
hospital has one of the top medical facilities in the world, being affiliated to a premier university.
She saw the real gap in terms of healthcare delivery between the Philippines and the U.S, as
new technologies play a major part for American physicians and nurses. Abbie took her to a tour
around the different wards of the teaching hospital. She saw how patients received care from
the physicians from Europe, via teleconferences and live video feeds from the internet, how
nurses delivered medications using calibrated pumps and machines needing little supervision,
and how computers carried the major tasks of critical care monitoring, with minimal risks of
human error and malpractice. All patients in every room are connected via Local Area Network
and are monitored by digital cameras in the nurses’ station, where Abbie oversees several
novice nurses. Rachel was amazed, and after a few chats with some of the staff, she came to a
room where a patient is being discharged.

“I’m happy that you are well taken care of here” Rachel Remarked.

“You’re right. I’m very happy that I’m well taken care of here.” The woman replied, “But it would
be better if I can talk to the nurses/staff frequently. It’s boring staying here all day without
anyone to talk to.” She laughed slowly. “I just need someone to talk to me, at least once every
day. Everyone here seems so busy.”

Francis talked about this to Abbie. “Yes, I know, ”Abbie said, “But you know, we do not have a
enough people here, they think that the machine is capable of caring for patients here.

VII. REFERENCES

http://www.carative.com/carative.html