Josephine G. Paterson &

Loretta T. ZderadHumanistic Nursing Theory

About Paterson:

• Born: September 1, 1924, in Freeport, New York• A graduate of Lenox Hill Hospital School of Nursing and St. John’s

University.• She received her Master’s degree from John Hopkin’s University School of

Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland.• Her Doctor of Nursing Science (1969) is from Boston University School of

Nursing, Boston, Massachusetts, where she specialized in Mental Health and Psychiatric nursing.

• Dr. Paterson conceptualized and taught humanistic nursing to graduate students, faculty and staff in a variety of settings.

• She also served on the faculty of the State University of New York at Stonybrook.

• She retired in 1985 as a clinical nurse specialist at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center at Northport, New York.

About Zderad:

• Born: June 7, 1925, Chicago, Illionis• She is a graduate of St. Bernard’s Hospital School of Nursing and of

Loyola University.• She received her Master of Science degree from Catholic University,

Washington DC, and a Doctor of Philosophy (1968) from Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

• She has taught in several universities and has lead groups on humanistic nursing.

• Dr. Zderad also served as a faculty of the State University of New York at Stonybrook.

• She retired in 1985 as the Associate Chief for Nursing Education at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center, Northport, New York.

Humanistic Nursing

• It is a nursing practice that is developed from lived experiences of the nurse and the person receiving care.

• It is the articulated vision of experience.• It is concerned with the Phenomenological experiences

of individuals and the exploration of human experiences. It requires entering the nursing situation fully aware of the “lenses” that we wear.

• It is knowing what values, biases, myths, and expectations we bring to the nursing experience. And we need to fully appreciate the values, biases, myths and expectations others bring to the nursing experience.

Humanistic Nursing

• The practice of humanistic nursing is rooted in existential thought. Existentialism is a philosophical approach to understanding life. Individuals are faced with possibilities when making choices. These choices determine the direction and meaning of one’s life. Since individuals are faced with freedom of choice, there is always a possibility of making errors.

• As a philosophy, Existentialism is particularly applicable to nursing within the framework of holistic health because of the emphasis on self-determination, free choice, and self-responsibility.

Humanistic Nursing

• Phenomenology – the study of the meaning of a phenomenon to a particular individual. It describes data of the immediate situation that help people understand the phenomena in question.

• - it is also describing human methods and primarily concerned with describing human experience in such a way that the fullness of experience is absorbed.

• Humanistic nursing is an existential-phenomenological-humanistic approach referring to a reverence for life that values the need for human interaction in order to determine the meaning that comes from the individual’s unique way of experiencing the world.

Humanistic Nursing

• Nursing occurs within the context of relationship. It is a nurturing response of one person to another in a time of need that aims toward the development of well being and more being.

• Nursing is a unique blend of Theory and Methodology. Theory cannot exist without the practice of nursing, for it depends on the experience of nursing and the reflection of that experience. Its methodology, is a unique blend of art and science. Science which consists of rules, laws, principles and theories that guide us and give direction to the nursing practice remain meaningless unless they are applied to living situations which becomes the art of nursing.

• The process of nursing as “quality care based in the concept of community”

Elements of Framework for Humanistic Nursing

• Incarnate men (patient and nurse) meeting (being and becoming) in a goal-directed (nurturing well-being and more-being), intersubjective transaction (being with and doing with) occurring in time and space (as measured and lived by patient and nurse) in a world of men and things.

3 concepts that provide basis (or components) of nursing

• Dialogue• Community• Phenomenologic Nursology

Dialogue• It is a nurse-nursed relating creatively. Humans need nursing.

Nurses need to nurse. Nursing is an intersubjective experience in which there is real sharing.

• MEETING – is the coming together of human beings and is characterized by the expectation that there will be a nurse and a nursed.

• RELATING – the process of nurse-nursed “doing” with each other is relating, being with each other. It may be Subject – Object relating which refers to how we use objects and know others through abstractions, conceptualizations, categorizing, labeling, and so on or Subject-Subject relating when both nurse and the client are open to each other as fully human, beyond the role of nurse and client, but as struggling, joyful, confused, and hopeful individuals facing the next moment.

Dialogue

• PRESENCE – the quality of being open, receptive, ready, and available to another person in a reciprocal manner.

• CALL AND RESPONSE – are transactional, sequential and simultaneous. Must be done “all at once”.

Community

• It is two or more persons striving together, living-dying all at once.

• Humanistic Nursing leads to community, it occurs within a community, and is affected by the community.

• It is through the intersubjective sharing of meaning in community that human becomings are comforted and nurtured.

• Community is the experience persons, and it is through community, persons relating to others, that it is possible to become.

• Humanistic nursing proposes that the nurse needs to be fully prepared to work in and with a community, exploring and valuing its reality.

Phenomenologic Nursology

1. Preparation of the nurse knower for coming to know.

2. Nurse knowing the other intuitively.3. Nurse knowing the other scientifically.4. Nurse complementarily synthesizing known

others.5. Succession within the nurse from the many

to the paradoxical one.