In order to teach nursing, one must reflect and understand one’s own personal teaching philosophy, that which arises from the motivation and inspiration both to become a nurse and to teach others to become a nurse. While teaching can of course benefit from the understanding and mastery of techniques and theory, there must be something which resonates deeply for the educator, and it is in understanding this that the teacher can pass on the spirit of inspiration which can contribute to renewal of the nursing profession and its core values. This becomes particularly important in light of the context of healthcare today, where a shortage of qualified professionals compounds lack of access to healthcare and healthcare itself faces a crisis of outcomes and patient safety (Watson & Foster, 2003).
Watson (2008) describes a model of caring economics, one in which the power struggles between the dominant class and those who are objectified and dehumanized due to income disparity, race and culture or difference is reduced to statistics and theory. In Watson’s caring economics every person and their situation is personal, and this provides a completely different approach to nursing, one which is very much rooted in the core of the history of the nursing tradition. Further, it is this model which both needs to be expanded on and returned to as part of the necessary reform which ensures that all Americans have access to healthcare and opportunity.
In Watson’s caring economics not only does caring not use up precious resources, including the resources of the nurse, it creates more caring. There are two aspects to this; not only does that mean teaching an approach where every patient deserves equal access, treatment and care, but so too does every student deserve personal attention, inclusion and contributing to that which is being taught and learned.
The Attending Nursing Caring Model based on Watson’s theory of human caring is intended to deal with the necessary transformation of the profession in the context of a crisis in healthcare which has manifested as unsustainable costs, a shortage of professionals and workers and the need for reform. (Watson & Foster, 2003). As Watson stated, “we must accept the invitation- even the mandate- to enter into the old/new morality that sustains caring for humans and for the earth in instances where their survival is threatened” (Watson 2008, 56). Without this philosophy, which encompasses both teaching and nursing, the result is only continuing a broken system that requires the sick to maintain sickness in order to sustain itself. True learning, and therefore true teaching, requires changing the paradigm entirely.
Without a radical change in the model and approach to nursing, is it really possible that the radically new approach to healthcare, as represented in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will have the framework needed to succeed?
If we continue to, as modelled by health insurers and executive administrators, see patients in the aggregate and outcomes from a statistical point of view we continue a system which thrives and prospers on the delivery of unnecessary tests and pointless treatments which do nothing for the health of patients, and serve only the profitable bottom line for the industry. Is this really a sustainable situation? Does it not seem likely that Americans will ultimately turn away from a system such as this which can never serve their needs as it remains enslaved to economic principles, rather than personalized care?
Changing the health industry to healthcare begins with a great shift in philosophy, and that change begins with how we teach nurses and the framework that we use to explain what nursing is. Going back to the roots of nursing, that being caring for the sick and advocating for the justice that ensures wellness, is a critical component of this.
- Watson, J., & Foster, R. (2003). The Attending Nurse Caring Model®: integrating theory, evidence and advanced caring–healing therapeutics for transforming professional practice. Journal of clinical nursing, 12(3), 360-365.
- Watson, J. (2008). Social Justice and Human Caring: A Model of Caring Science as a Hopeful Paradigm for Moral Justice for Humanity. Creative Nursing, 14(2): 54-61.
