Jean Watson’s theory of informative caring identifies nursing as a healthcare profession focused on promoting health, preventing illness, providing care for the sick, and restoring health. According to Jean Watson, the central point in nursing is the human component and the encounter between the patient and the caregiver (Watson & Woodward, 2020). The theory describes human care as a process characterized by a transpersonal caring relationship. Such a relationship must be guided by humanistic values and the need to provide care and curative services. Jean Watson presented the patient as a whole; however, their body, mind, and soul are distinguishable from each other. Based on this belief, Jean Watson noted that each patient as an individual has unique mental, bodily, and spiritual needs (Watson & Woodward, 2020). Such needs can only be met from a holistic approach. The focus on the patient as the recipient of care defines the metaparadigm of nursing of the person, health, environment, and nursing (Alharbi & Baker, 2020).

The centrality of nursing is caring. Jean Watson assumed that care could only be practiced and provided interpersonally, caring seeks to satisfy certain human needs, effective caring promotes health and individual growth, caring involves accepting the patient as they are as of now and how they may become, caring complements curing, and that nursing defines a caring environment (Watson & Woodward, 2020). The theory’s practice implications (in a time when capitalistic systems dominate nursing practice) can define the caring value of nursing to serve humanity humanly. It is the sense of the purpose to provide curative care to those in need that can fulfill nurses’ and the patient’s emotional, psychological, and physical needs.

References

Alharbi, K., & Baker, D. O. G. (2020). Jean Watson’s middle range theory of human caring: A critique. International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Scientific Research (IJAMSR) ISSN: 2581-4281, 3 (1), 1-14.

Watson, J., & Woodward, T. (2020). Jean Watson’s theory of human caring. SAGE Publications