According to Petripin (2023), nursing theory is “an organized framework of concepts and purposes designed to guide the practice of nursing”. They are developed to explain and describe nursing care, guide nursing practice, research and provide a foundation for clinical decision making. The two nursing theories I will discuss are of the two theorists Jean Watson and Madeleine Leininger’s nursing theories of which originated under the Developmental Model branch.
Jean Watson’s Human Caring Nursing Theory focuses on the principle of caring. It explains the importance for the patient and nurse to have a caring compassionate relationship. Furthermore, Waston’s theory addresses the concerns of how nurses care for their patients and that patients are not objects but valued human beings. Watson refers to human beings as a valued person to be cared for, respected, nurtured, understood, and assisted. According to Gonzalo (2023), her theory stresses the humanistic aspects of nursing as they intertwine with scientific knowledge and nursing practice. She also emphasizes the importance of promoting health, caring for the sick, and treating diseases. Watson devised 10 caring needs specific carative factors critical to the caring human experience that need to be addressed by nurses with their patients when in a caring role (Gonzalo, 2013).
Madeleine Leininger’s Transcultural Nursing Theory focuses on nursing care to fit with or have beneficial meaning and health outcomes for people of different or similar cultural backgrounds (Gonzalo, 2023). It involves knowing and understanding different cultures concerning nursing and health-illness caring practices, beliefs, and values to provide meaningful and efficacious nursing care services to people’s cultural values health-illness context (Gonzalo, 2023). According to McFarland & Wehbe-Alamah (2019, as cited in McFarland, 2018c; McFarland & Wehbe-Alamah, 2015), the Cultural Care Theory was designed to help guide nurse researchers in discovering new meanings, patterns, expressions, and practices related to culture care that have influenced the health and well-being of individuals, families, and cultural groups. The goal of Leininger’s theory is for nurses to be knowledgeable in providing transcultural nursing care that will assist the patients’ well-being, health, assisting them to face disabilities and death. Leininger developed three cultural care decisions and actions for nurses to succeed and provide culturally friendly care. They are cultural preservation, cultural care accommodation or negotiation, and cultural care repatterning or restructuring (Petripin, 2023).
Comparing Transcultural and Human Caring Theories, they both fall under the Developmental Model branch of which assumes that there is a process of growth or maturation that is directional and has some orderly purpose (Tourville & Ingalls, 2003, p. 28). Leininger and Watson both identify nursing as a humanistic science with the concept of caring being the central unifying domain of nursing (Cohen, 1991, p. 908). Both have demonstrated their artistry in their individual portraits of change and in their contributions to the development of nursing knowledge (Cohen, 1991, p. 909).
The origin of both nursing theories was developed from Watson’s and Leininger’s different background experiences. With that said, both have a different view regarding caring in which they demonstrate a difference in emphasis on philosophical, cultural, and empirical concerns. For example, Leininger stresses the importance of nurses to be knowledgeable in caring for people with different cultural backgrounds because they have different values, beliefs, customs, and behaviors. On the other hand, Watson has focused on the philosophic (existential-phenomenological) and spiritual basis of caring and sees caring as the ethical and moral ideal of nursing (Cohen, 1991, p. 909).
As I look forward to the future of becoming a nurse educator, I feel that Leininger and Watson’s nursing theories will be essential to my future profession. However, Leininger’s nursing theory is more applicable to my practice because it involves knowing and understanding different cultures concerning nursing and health-illness caring practices, beliefs, and values to provide meaningful and efficacious nursing care services to people’s cultural values health-illness context (Gonzalo, 2023). My practice consists of working in the outpatient and in the inpatient settings in which we see many patients from around the world with different cultural backgrounds. This nursing theory will be essential to our wound and ostomy team because it will guide us to provide optimal cultural patient care not only to the patients but also to their families as well.
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