Nursing is defined by caring. At Redlands Community Hospital, nursing has embraced the theory of Jean Watson’s Caring Science. Caring Science helps us to embrace the positive energy that flows from an integrated mind, body and spirit and is mutually rewarding to both the patient and the nurse. Forged by the vision of Florence Nightingale who asserted that the “role of a nurse is to put her patient in the best position to be able to self-heal”, nurses are optimally positioned to be the heart of healing. By actively engaging in caring through authentic presence and intentionality, the nurse is able to optimize her patient’s ability to heal from within. How do we as nurses maintain emotional sensitivity and caring attitudes in an over-stressed and demanding workplace? Jean Watson contends that caring regenerates life energies and potentiates our capabilities. The benefits are immeasurable and promote self-actualization on both a personal and professional level. Caring is a mutually beneficial experience for both the patient and the nurse, as well as between all health team members. In addition, it is important to remember that Watson emphasizes that we must care for ourselves to be able to care for others; self-healing is a necessary process for rejuvenating our energy reserves and replenishing our spiritual bank. Be the difference that makes the difference. It’s what you say and do, and how you say and do it. Caring, safeguards and affirms our humanity. It unveils our true thoughts, feelings, and attitudes and allows us to live more authentically in our relationships. Caring improves patient outcomes and customer satisfaction. It is contagious and infuses caring-energy into others. It invokes awareness and intuition. It is positive and inspirational. It is the wonder-glue of enduring relationships and human connectedness. Caring is what makes Redlands Community Hospital a special place! - Excerpt from 2011 Nurses’ Day Celebration Nurses at Redlands Community Hospital have selected Jean Watson’s Theory of Human Caring (Theory of Transpersonal Caring) as the foundation for their nursing practice. According to Watson (1997), the core of the Theory of Caring is that “humans cannot be treated as objects and that humans cannot be separated from self, other, nature, and the larger workforce.” Her theory encompasses the whole world of nursing; with the emphasis placed on the interpersonal process between the care giver and care recipient. The theory is focused on “the centrality of human caring and on the caring-to-caring transpersonal relationship and its healing potential for both the one who is caring and the one who is being cared for” (Watson, 1996). The structure for the science of caring is built upon ten carative factors. These are:
Early in her career, Madeleine Leininger recognized the importance of the element of caring in the profession of nursing. Through her observations while working as a nurse, she identified a lack of cultural and care knowledge as the missing component to a nurse’s understanding of the many variations required in patient care to support compliance, healing, and wellness. Leininger’s Culture Care Theory attempts to provide culturally congruent nursing care through “cognitively based assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling acts or decisions that are mostly tailor-made to fit with individual, group’s, or institution’s cultural values, beliefs, and lifeways.” The intent of the care is to fit with or have beneficial meaning and health outcomes for people of different or similar culture backgrounds. Culturally congruent care is possible when the following occurs in the nurse-patient relationship: “Together the nurse and the client creatively design a new or different care lifestyle for the health or well-being of the client. This mode requires the use of both generic and professional knowledge and ways to fit such diverse ideas into nursing care actions and goals. Care knowledge and skill are often repatterned for the best interest of the clients. Thus all care modalities require coparticipation of the nurse and clients (consumers) working together to identify, plan, implement, and evaluate each caring mode for culturally congruent nursing care. These modes can stimulate nurses to design nursing actions and decisions using new knowledge and culturally based ways to provide meaningful and satisfying wholistic care to individuals, groups or institutions.” Leininger’s model has developed into a movement in nursing care called transcultural nursing. In 1995, Leininger defined transcultural nursing as “a substantive area of study and practice focused on comparative cultural care (caring) values, beliefs, and practices of individuals or groups of similar or different cultures with the goal of providing culture-specific and universal nursing care practices in promoting health or well-being or to help people to face unfavorable human conditions, illness, or death in culturally meaningful ways.” Leininger developed new terms for the basic concepts of her theory. The concepts addressed in the model are:
The theory’s culturalogical assessment provides a holistic, comprehensive overview of the client’s background. The assessment addresses the following:
Leininger proposes that there are three modes for guiding nurses judgments, decisions, or actions in order to provide appropriate, beneficial, and meaningful care: preservation and/or maintenance; accommodation and/or negotiation; and re-patterning and/or restructuring. The modes have greatly influenced the nurse’s ability to provide culturally congruent nursing care, as well as fostering culturally-competent nurses. Leininger’s model makes the following assumptions:
The Culture Care Theory defines nursing as a learned scientific and humanistic profession that focuses on human care phenomena and caring activities in order to help, support, facilitate, or enable patients to maintain or regain health in culturally meaningful ways, or to help them face handicaps or death. The Sunshine Model is Leininger’s visual aid to the Culture Care Theory. |