Current circumstances provide caring and nursing for a rethink due to the fact that the two professions are intertwined both definitively and by way of implementation. As such, caring pertains to the exhibition, as well as the feeling of empathy and concern for others, especially with regard to overall human wellbeing. While exhibiting compassion, requisite actions should be implemented with reference to the nursing and medical fraternities in general. Dr. Jean Watson’s caring theory, well known in the medical and specifically the nursing fraternity, provides three core elements with reference to enhanced health and nursing care. These three basics are occasional caring moment, transpersonal caring relationship, and present curative factors.
Due to the fact that a majority of healthcare systems are undergoing core administrative restructuring, there is the potential possibility of ‘dehumanizing’ patient health and mental care. Consequently, if to maintain the idea that caring is the core basis of nursing, the nursing fraternity at large will have to make conscious efforts towards preserving pertinent human caring within not only their clinical application/practice, but also in the educational, research and administrative aspects of nursing care. This provides a need for maintaining adequate nursing care as part of the larger medical fraternity’s heritage with an input from the aforementioned aspects. According to Anne Boykin, Simone Roach and Madeleine Leininger, their caring theories can provide fundamental input (Watson, 2001).
With the dynamic nature of existing global healthcare delivery systems portending to changing contexts, the nursing fraternity has witnessed an increase in workloads, as well as core responsibilities and duties. Hence, there is a need for nurses to deal with existing patient’s complexity and acuity in accordance with the prevailing healthcare contexts. Furthermore, there is the fact that despite enduring complicated situations, the nurses must also find other means of preserving their pertinent care practice with a glance to the aforementioned Dr. Watson’s caring theory, which is pertinent to this goal. The application of this theory allows the nursing and major medical fraternity to return to its foundation/ professional basis and values by way of representing an ideal nurse archetype. For this reason, caring endorses the nursing professional identity considering whether humanistic values are ideally and constantly challenged and questioned with the aim of further enhancement of overall care.
When carried out on a daily basis, such pragmatic care and health provisions enhance the transcendence of nursing. It means that ordinary job turns into a much more satisfying and meaningful profession. Hence, Watson’s caring theory not only allows the nursing fraternity to practice general caring, but also entails the provision of compassion with the aim of alleviating both the patients’ and their families’ suffering. It further goes towards enhancing the faster recovery/healing as well as preserving the patients’ dignity with the additional role of contributing to the nursing fraternity’s greater self-actualization. Delving not only into the role of the patient as the receiver of the care, the theory further perfectly focuses on the caregiver who is a relevant figure of the healthcare system. As it was mentioned above, three core elements define this theory, and each of these essentials is pertinent to the overall effectiveness of patient’s health and mental wellbeing (Beauchamp, 2009).
Furthermore, carative factors pertain to the guiding principles of core nursing. Its contrastive features are portrayed as opposed to current conventional carative factors. Their main difference consists in the fact that they aim at honoring the present human dimensions with respect to nursing work (the profession), as well as the patients’ inner lives and subjective experiences. Ten elements are present within this facet i.e. a system value based on humanistic altruism; the existence of faith and hope; an increased self-sensitivity and perception of others; the enhancement of human care relationships, which are both helpful and based on trust; the expression of actual feelings (both positive and negative); as well as the formation of creative processes in accordance with problem-solving in care, learning, and teaching based on transpersonal interactions.
In addition, nursing assistance should be provided with regard to human needs. It involves the acknowledgement of prevailing existential-phenomenological spiritual forces, and the provision of protective, supportive and corrective environments critical towards greater spiritual, societal, mental and physical wellbeing. Since a spiritual essence is an important factor to consider, there should be a discernible focus on the aspect of care dealing with moral values with reference to both the provider and receiver. This entails greater accountability in order to enhance the nursing fraternity in virtue of evidence-based plans rested not only upon trend analysis, but also upon the quantification of impacts resulting from safety and quality of care. With regard to transpersonal caring relationships, there is the presence of moral commitment, especially towards both enhancing and protecting human dignity because care is consciously communicated with respect to honoring and preserving the patient’s embodied spirit (McGraw, 2002).
It is apparent that the nurses’ caring connection and consciousness potentially have healing capability, as particular perception, intentional connection and experience are