JOYCE TRAVELBEE

o Human To Human Relationship Model

o “The nurse is responsible for helping the patient avoid and alleviate the distress of unmet
needs.”
o Human-to-Human Relationship Model presented in her book Interpersonal Aspects of
Nursing
o She dealt with the interpersonal aspects of nursing.
o She explains “human-to-human relationship is the means through which the purpose of
nursing if fulfilled”
About the Theorist

o Psychiatric nurse, educator and writer born in 1926.

1956 - completed her BSN degree at Louisiana State University

1959 - completed her Master of Science Degree in Nursing at Yale University.

1952 - Psychiatric Nursing Instructor at DePaul Hospital Affiliate School, New Orleans.

o Later in Charity Hospital School of Nursing in Louisiana State University, New York
University and University of Mississippi.
Development of the Theory

o Existentialism
o Soren Kierkegaard
Existential theory believes that that humans are constantly faced choices and conflicts and
is accountable to the choices we make in life

Doctor Frankl

o Book -- Man's Search for Meaning (1963).

Suffering

i. "An experience that varies in intensity, duration and depth ... a feeling of unease,
ranging from mild, transient mental, physical or mental discomfort to extreme pain
and extreme tortured ..."
Meaning

i. Reason as oneself attributes

Nursing

i. Help man to find meaning in the experience of illness and suffering.

 ii. Responsibility to help individuals and their families to find meaning.
iii. The nurses' spiritual and ethical choices, and perceptions of illness and suffering, is
crucial to helping to find meaning.
Hope

i. Nurse's job is to help the patient to maintain hope and avoid hopelessness.
ii. Hope is a faith that can and will be change that would bring something better with
it.
iii. Hope's core lies in a fundamental trust the outside world, and a belief that others
will help someone when you need it.
iv. 6 important factors
Characteristics of hope are:

o Strongly associated with dependence on other people.

o Future oriented.
o Linked to elections from several alternatives or escape routes out of its situation.
o The desire to possess any object or condition, to complete a task or have an experience.
o Confidence that others will be there for one when you need them.
o The hoping person is in possession of courage to be able to acknowledge its
shortcomings and fears and go forward
Communications

i. "a strict necessity for good nursing care"

ii. Using himself therapeutic

"one is able to use itself therapeutic."

Self-awareness and self-understanding, understanding of human behavior, the ability to

predict one's own and others' behavior are important in this process.

iii. Targeted intellectual approach

-Nurse must have a systematic intellectual approach to the patient's situation.

Person

o Person is defined as a human being.

o Both the nurse and the patient are human beings.
o a unique irreplaceable individual - a one time being in this world- like yet unlike any
person who has ever lived or ever will live
o a unique, irreplaceable individual who is in continuous process of becoming, evolving
and changing
 o Patients are only individual human beings in need of care, services and assistance of
other human beings who can render the assistance that is needed.

Health

o Health is subjective and objective.

o Subjective health
o Individually defined state of well-being in accord with self-appraisal of physical-
emotional-spiritual status.
o Objective health
o Absence of discernible disease, disability of defect as measured by physical
examination, laboratory tests and assessment by spiritual director or psychological
counselor.
Environment

o Environment is not clearly defined.

o Life experiences
o suffering, hope, pain, illness
o can be indirectly equated to the environment

Nursing

o "an interpersonal process whereby the professional nurse practitioner assists an

individual, family or community to prevent or cope with experience or illness and
suffering, and if necessary, to find meaning in these experiences.”
Other significant terms:

Nurse- Patient Interaction

o refers to any contact between a nurse and an ill person

Therapeutic use of self

o ability to use one’s personality consciously and in full awareness in an attempt to

establish relatedness and to structure nursing intervention
Description of the theory

o Nursing is accomplished through human-to-human relationships that begin with the

original encounter and then progress through stages of emerging identities, developing
feelings of empathy, and later feelings of sympathy.
o The nurse and patient attain a rapport in the final stage.
o For meeting the goals of nursing, it is a prerequisite to achieving a genuine human-to-
human relationships.
o relationship can only be established by an interaction process.

Human-to-human relationship

o an experience or series of experiences between nurse and patient

 o means thru which the purpose of nursing is accomplished
Phases of experience:

1.original encounter -first impressions

2.emerging identities -perceiving each other’s uniqueness

3.empathy -ability to share in the person’s experience

4.sympathy -when the nurse wants to lessen the cause of patient’s suffering

-therapeutic use of self

-“When one sympathizes, one is involved but not incapacitated by the involvement.”

5.rapport -described as nursing interventions that lessens the patient’s suffering

-relation as human being to human being

-“A nurse is able to establish rapport because she possesses the necessary knowledge and
skills required to assist ill persons and because she is able to perceive, respond to and
appreciate the uniqueness of the ill human being.”

-“A nurse does not only seek to alleviate physical pain or render physical care

– she ministers to the whole person. The existence of the suffering whether physical, mental or
spiritual is the proper concern of the nurse.”

Travelbee’s ideas

o Greatly influenced the hospice movement in the west.

o Travelbee died at age 47.