Jean Watson

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The field of nursing involves more that the details of physical care for someone who is ill. Jean Watson explains that nursing is a field like teaching, where it is more than a job, but instead an enriching career involving a lifetime of growth and learning. Florence Nightingale was "called" to the field of nursing by a sense of ethical responsibility to those in need. Watson explains that this spirit in nursing is still alive today. Jean Watson developed the theory of human caring with the purpose of holding nurses accountable to this philosophy. A research paper on Jean Watson will discuss the following:

1. Watson's theory by summarizing the theory
2. Explaining in the research paper how Jean Watson's theory contributes to nursing in today's environment
3. How Watson's theory applies to various nursing systems

Watson's theory holds that every nurse should understand the relationship between his or her personal traits and the professional requirements expected in the field of nursing. The unique personal traits of a nurse should enhance the service of caring and healing. Watson states, "I consider my work more a philosophical, ethical, intellectual blueprint for nursing's evolving disciplinary/professional matrix, rather than a specific theory per se'." Her theory is essentially a scientific approach to caring processes, phenomena, and experiences.

The theory of human caring was developed by Jean Watson between 1975 and 1979. While teaching at the University of Colorado, Dr. Watson combined ideas from her background in nursing and in educational, clinical and social psychology. She wanted to emphasize the importance of nursing, as it generally was overlooked as an important field in health. However, nurses embrace their own values, knowledge, and practices in regard to patient treatment. She also felt that the values held by nursing professionals could transcend other sub-specialties of health care as well as other fields in general.

Jean Watson And Nursing Care

She recognized that practices of human caring embraced by the nursing field were focused on "subjective inner healing processes and the life world of the experiencing person". These processes were termed "carative factors." In contrast, conventional medicine concentrates on "curative factors".

Ten Carative factors, or "caritas," formulate the framework for providing nursing care. "Caritas" is a Greek word meaning to cherish or appreciate something that is precious. It includes love, but on a deeper transpersonal level of caring. She states, "This relationship between love and caring connotes inner healing for self and others, extending to nature, and the larger universe, unfolding and evolving within a cosmology that is both metaphysical and transcendent with the co-evolving human in the universe".