APPLICATION OF WATSON'S THEORY OF CARING TO THE CARE OF AN
ELDERLY CLIENT IN A LONG TERM CARE FACILITY
According to Watson (1988), caring about patients is central to nursing. However, in today's ideological and technological climate, the caring values of nurses and nursing have been submerged. Watson views the caring role to be threatened by increased medical technology, bureaucratic managerial institutional constraints, and a proliferation of curing and radical treatment cure techniques, often without regard to cost. Nurses are called upon to both preserve and advance human caring behavior and values through their interpersonal interactions with patients.
Watson (1995) lists ten carative factors said to be central to nursing behaviors that preserve and advance caring values. These factors are:
*Forming and Acting from a Humanistic Altruistic System of Values Enabling and Sustaining Faith Hope
*Developing Helping Trusting, Caring Relationship (seeking transpersonal connection)
*Promoting and Accepting the Expression of Positive and Negative Feelings and Emotions
*Engaging in Creative, Individualized, Problem Solving Caring Process
*Promoting Transpersonal Teaching Learning Attending to Supportive, Protective, and/or Corrective, Mental, Physical, Societal, and Spiritual Environment
*Assisting with Gratification of Basic Human Needs, While Preserving Human Dignity and Wholeness
*Allowing For, Being Open To, Existential Phenomenological and Spiritual Dimensions of Caring and Healing Which Cannot Be Fully Explained Scientifically Through the Western Mind of Modern Society.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of how Watson's basic theory and principles are applied to the needs of an elderly client in a long term care facility.
The client, Ms. Rose, lives in a large continuing care retirement community. The setting contains facilities that provide a variety of...