Florence Nightingale
ability to help people, sick or well, cope
• Founder of Modern Nursing and Pioneer
of the Environmental Theory.
• Defined Nursing as “the act of utilizing
the environment of the patient to assist
him in his recovery.”
• Stated that nursing “ought to signify the
proper use of fresh air, light, warmth,
cleanliness, quiet, and the proper
selection and administration of diet – all
at the least expense of vital power to the
patient.”
• Identified five (5) environmental factors:
fresh air, pure water, efficient drainage,
cleanliness or sanitation, and light or
direct sunlight.
Hildegard E. Peplau
• Pioneered the Theory of Interpersonal
Relations
• Peplau’s theory defined Nursing as “An
interpersonal process of therapeutic
interactions between an individual who
is sick or in need of health services and a
nurse specially educated to recognize,
respond to the need for help.”
• Her work is influenced by Henry Stack
Sullivan, Percival Symonds, Abraham
Maslow, and Neal Elgar Miller.
• It helps nurses and healthcare providers
develop more therapeutic interventions
in the clinical setting.
Virginia Henderson
• Developed the Nursing Need Theory
• Focuses on the importance of increasing
the patient’s independence to hasten
their progress in the hospital.
• Emphasizes the basic human needs and
how nurses can assist in meeting those
needs.
• “The nurse is expected to carry out a
physician’s therapeutic plan, but
individualized care is the result of the
nurse’s creativity in planning for care.”
Faye Glenn Abdellah
• Developed the 21 Nursing Problems
Theory
• “Nursing is based on an art and science
that molds the attitudes, intellectual
competencies, and technical skills of the
individual nurse into the desire and
with their health needs.”
• Changed the focus of nursing from
disease-centered to patient-centered
and began to include families and
the elderly in nursing care.
• The nursing model is intended to guide
care in hospital institutions but can also
be applied to community health nursing,
as well.
Ernestine Wiedenbach
• Developed The Helping Art of Clinical
Nursing conceptual model.
• Definition of nursing reflects on nurse-
midwife experience as “People may
differ in their concept of nursing, but
few would disagree that nursing is
nurturing or caring for someone in a
motherly fashion.”
• Guides the nurse action in the art of
nursing and specified four elements of
clinical nursing: philosophy, purpose,
practice, and art.
• Clinical nursing is focused on meeting
the patient’s perceived need for help in
a visionof nursing that indicates
considerable importance on the art of
nursing.
Lydia E. Hall
• Developed the Care, Cure, Core Theory
is also known as the “Three Cs of Lydia
Hall.“
• Hall defined Nursing as the
“participation in care, core and cure
aspects of patient care, where CARE is
the sole function of nurses, whereas the
CORE and CURE are shared with other
members of the health team.”
• The major purpose of care is to achieve
an interpersonal relationship with the
individual to facilitate the development
of the core.
• The “care” circle defines a professional
nurse’s primary role, such as providing
bodily care for the patient. The “core” is
the patient receiving nursing care. The
“cure” is the aspect of nursing that
involves the administration of
medications and treatments.
Joyce Travelbee
• States in her Human-to-Human
Relationship Model that the purpose of
nursing was to help and support an
 individual, family, or community to
prevent or cope with the struggles of
illness and suffering and, if necessary, to
find significance in these occurrences,
with the ultimate goal being the
presence of hope.
• Nursing was accomplished through
human-to-human relationships.
• Extended the interpersonal relationship
theories of Peplau and Orlando.
Kathryn E. Barnard
• Developed the Child Health
Assessment Model.
• Concerns improving the health of infants
and their families.
• Her findings on parent-child interaction
as an important predictor of cognitive
development helped shape public
policy.
• She is the founder of the Nursing Child
Assessment Satellite Training Project
(NCAST), which produces and develops
research-based products, assessment,
and training programs to teach
professionals, parents, and
other caregivers the skills to provide
nurturing environments for young
children.
• Borrows from psychology and human
development and focuses on mother-
infant interaction with the environment.
• Contributed a close link to practice that
has modified the way health care
providers assess children in light of the
parent-child relationship.
Evelyn Adam
• Focuses on the development of models
and theories on the concept of nursing.
• Includes the profession’s goal, the
beneficiary of the professional service,
the role of the professional, the source
of the beneficiary’s difficulty, the
intervention of the professional, and the
consequences.
• A good example of using a unique basis
of nursing for further expansion.
Nancy Roper, Winifred Logan, and Alison J. Tierney
• A Model for Nursing Based on a
Model of Living
• Logan produced a simple theory, “which
actually helped bedside nurses.”
• The trio collaborated in the fourth
edition of The Elements of Nursing: A
Model for Nursing Based on a Model of
Living and prepared a monograph
entitled The Roper-Logan-Tierney Model
of Nursing: Based on Activities of Daily
Living.
• Includes maintaining a safe
environment, communicating, breathing,
eating and drinking, eliminating,
personal cleansing and dressing,
controlling body temperature,
mobilizing, working and playing,
expressing sexuality, sleeping,
and dying.
Ida Jean Orlando
• She developed the Nursing Process
Theory.
• “Patients have their own meanings and
interpretations of situations, and
therefore nurses must validate their
inferences and analyses with patients
before drawing conclusions.”
• Allows nurses to formulate an
effective nursing care plan that can also
be easily adapted when and if any
complexity comes up with the patient.
• According to her, persons become
patients requiring nursing care when
they have needs for help that cannot be
met independently because of their
physical limitations, negative reactions
to an environment, or experience that
prevents them from communicating
their needs.
• The role of the nurse is to find out and
meet the patient’s immediate needs for
help.
Jean Watson
• She pioneered the Philosophy and
Theory of Transpersonal Caring.
• “Nursing is concerned with promoting
health, preventing illness, caring for the
sick, and restoring health.”
• Mainly concerns with how nurses care
for their patients and how that caring
progresses into better plans to promote
health and wellness, prevent illness and
restore health.
• Focuses on health promotion, as well as
the treatment of diseases.
• Caring is central to nursing practice and
promotes health better than a simple
medical cure.
Marilyn Anne Ray
 • Developed the Theory of Bureaucratic
Caring
• “Improved patient safety, infection
control, reduction in medication errors,
and overall quality of care in complex
bureaucratic health care systems cannot
occur without knowledge and
understanding of complex organizations,
such as the political and economic
systems, and spiritual-ethical caring,
compassion and right action for all
patients and professionals.”
• Challenges participants in nursing to
think beyond their usual frame of
reference and envision the world
holistically while considering the
universe as a hologram.
• Presents a different view of how health
care organizations and nursing
phenomena interrelate as wholes and
parts in the system.
Patricia Benner
• Caring, Clinical Wisdom, and Ethics in
Nursing Practice
• “The nurse-patient relationship is not a
uniform, professionalized blueprint but
rather a kaleidoscope of intimacy and
distance in some of the most dramatic,
poignant, and mundane moments of
life.”
• Attempts to assert and reestablish
nurses’ caring practices when nurses are
rewarded more for efficiency, technical
skills, and measurable outcomes.
• States that caring practices are instilled
with knowledge and skill regarding
everyday human needs.
Kari Martinsen
• Philosophy of Caring
• “Nursing is founded on caring for life, on
neighborly love, […]At the same time,
the nurse must be professionally
educated.”
• Human beings are created and are
beings for whom we may have
administrative responsibility.
• Caring, solidarity, and moral practice are
unavoidable realities.
Katie Eriksson
• Theory of Carative Caring
• “Caritative nursing means that we take
‘caritas’ into use when caring for the
human being in health and suffering […]
Caritative caring is a manifestation of the
love that ‘just exists’ […] Caring
communion, true caring, occurs when
the one caring in a spirit of caritas
alleviates the suffering of the patient.”
• The ultimate goal of caring is to lighten
suffering and serve life and health.
• Inspired many in the Nordic countries
and used it as the basis of research,
education, and clinical practice.
Myra Estrin Levine
• According to the Conservation Model,
“Nursing is human interaction.”
• Provides a framework within which to
teach beginning nursing students.
• Logically congruent, externally and
internally consistent, has breadth and
depth, and is understood, with few
exceptions, by professionals and
consumers of health care.
Martha E. Rogers
• In Roger’s Theory of Human Beings,
she defined Nursing as “an art and
science that is humanistic and
humanitarian.
• The Science of Unitary Human Beings
contains two dimensions: the science of
nursing, which is the knowledge specific
to the field of nursing that comes from
scientific research; and the art of
nursing, which involves using nursing
creatively to help better the lives of the
patient.
• A patient can’t be separated from his or
her environment when addressing
health and treatment.
Dorothea E. Orem
• In her Self-Care Theory, she defined
Nursing as “The act of assisting others in
the provision and management of self-
care to maintain or improve human
functioning at the home level of
effectiveness.”
• Focuses on each individual’s ability to
perform self-care.
• Composed of three interrelated theories:
(1) the theory of self-care, (2) the self-
care deficit theory, and (3) the theory of
nursing systems, which is further
classified into wholly compensatory,
partially compensatory, and supportive-
educative.
Imogene M. King
• Conceptual System and Middle-Range
Theory of Goal Attainment
• “Nursing is a process of action, reaction
and interaction by which nurse and
client share information about their
perception in a nursing situation” and “a
process of human interactions between
nurse and client whereby each perceives
the other and the situation, and through
communication, they set goals, explore
means, and agree on means to achieve
goals.”
• Focuses on this process to guide and
direct nurses in the nurse-patient
relationship, going hand-in-hand with
their patients to meet good health goals.
• Explains that the nurse and patient go
hand-in-hand in communicating
information, set goals together, and
then take actions to achieve those goals.
Betty Neuman
• In Neuman’s System Model,
she defined nursing as a “unique
profession in that is concerned with all
of the variables affecting an individual’s
response to stress.”
• The focus is on the client as a system
(which may be an individual, family,
group, or community) and on the client’s
responses to stressors.
• The client system includes five variables
(physiological, psychological,
sociocultural, developmental, and
spiritual). It is conceptualized as an inner
core (basic energy resources)
surrounded by concentric circles that
include lines of resistance, a normal
defense line, and a flexible line of
defense.
Sister Callista Roy
• In Adaptation Model, Roy defined
nursing as a “health care profession that
focuses on human life processes and
patterns and emphasizes the promotion
of health for individuals, families,
groups, and society as a whole.”
• Views the individual as a set of
interrelated systems that strives to
maintain a balance between various
stimuli.
• Inspired the development of many
middle-range nursing theories and
adaptation instruments.
Dorothy E. Johnson
• The Behavioral System Model defined
Nursing as “an external regulatory force
that acts to preserve the organization
and integrate the patients’ behaviors at
an optimum level under those
conditions in which the behavior
constitutes a threat to the physical or
social health or in which illness is found.”
• Advocates to foster efficient and
effective behavioral functioning in the
patient to prevent illness and stresses
the importance of research-based
knowledge about the effect of nursing
care on patients.
• Describes the person as a behavioral
system with seven subsystems: the
achievement, attachment-affiliative,
aggressive-protective, dependency,
ingestive, eliminative, and sexual
subsystems.
Anne Boykin and Savina O. Schoenhofer
• The Theory of Nursing as Caring: A
Model for Transforming Practice
• Nursing is an “exquisitely interwoven”
unity of aspects of the discipline and
profession of nursing.
• Nursing’s focus and aim as a discipline
of knowledge and a professional service
are “nurturing persons living to care and
growing in caring.”
• Caring in nursing is “an altruistic, active
expression of love, and is the intentional
and embodied recognition of value and
connectedness.”
Afaf Ibrahim Meleis
• Transitions Theory
• It began with observations of
experiences faced as people deal with
changes related to health, well-being,
and the ability to care for themselves.
• Types of transitions include
developmental, health and illness,
situational, and organizational.
• Acknowledges the role of nurses as they
help people go through health/illness
and life transitions.
• Focuses on assisting nurses in facilitating
patients’, families’, and communities’
healthy transitions.
Nola J. Pender
• Health Promotion Model
• Describes the interaction between the
nurse and the consumer while
considering the role of the health
promotion environment.
• It focuses on three areas: individual
characteristics and experiences,
behavior-specific cognitions and affect,
and behavioral outcomes.
• Describes the multidimensional nature
of persons as they interact within their
environment to pursue health
. uses an abstract body of knowledge to
Madeleine M. Leininger
• Culture Care Theory of Diversity and
Universality
• Defined transcultural nursing as “a
substantive area of study and practice
focused on comparative cultural care
(caring) values, beliefs, and practices of
individuals or groups of similar or
different cultures to provide culture-
specific and universal nursing care
practices in promoting health or well-
being or to help people to face
unfavorable human conditions, illness, or
death in culturally meaningful ways.”
• Involves learning and understanding
various cultures regarding nursing and
health-illness caring practices, beliefs,
and values to implement significant and
efficient nursing care services to people
according to their cultural values and
health-illness context.
• It focuses on the fact that various
cultures have different and unique
caring behaviors and different health
and illness values, beliefs, and patterns
of behaviors.
Margaret A. Newman
• Health as Expanding Consciousness
• “Nursing is the process of recognizing
the patient in relation to the
environment, and it is the process of the
understanding of consciousness.”
• “The theory of health as expanding
consciousness was stimulated by
concern for those for whom health as
the absence of disease or disability is
not possible . . . “
• Nursing is regarded as a connection
between the nurse and patient, and both
grow in the sense of higher levels of
consciousness.
Rosemarie Rizzo Parse
• Human Becoming Theory
• “Nursing is a science, and the
performing art of nursing is practiced in
relationships with persons (individuals,
groups, and communities) in their
processes of becoming.”
• Explains that a person is more than the
sum of the parts, the environment, and
the person is inseparable and that
nursing is a human science and art that
help people.
• It centered around three themes:
meaning, rhythmicity, and
transcendence.
Helen C. Erickson, Evelyn M. Tomlin, and Mary Ann P.
Swain
• Modeling and Role-Modeling
• “Nursing is the holistic helping of
persons with their self-care activities in
relation to their health . . . The goal is to
achieve a state of perceived optimum
health and contentment.”
• Modeling is a process that allows nurses
to understand the unique perspective of
a client and learn to appreciate its
importance.
• Role-modeling occurs when the nurse
plans and implements interventions that
are unique for the client.
Gladys L. Husted and James H. Husted
• Created the Symphonological
Bioethical Theory
• “Symphonology (from ‘symphonia,’ a
Greek word meaning agreement) is a
system of ethics based on the terms and
preconditions of an agreement.”
• Nursing cannot occur without both
nurse and patient. “A nurse takes no
actions that are not interactions.”
• Founded on the singular concept of
human rights, the essential agreement
of non-aggression among rational
people forms the foundation of all
human interaction.
Ramona T. Mercer
• Maternal Role Attainment—Becoming
a Mother
 • “Nursing is a dynamic profession with
three major foci: health promotion and
prevention of illness, providing care for
those who need professional assistance
to achieve their optimal level of health
and functioning, and research to
enhance the knowledge base for
providing excellent nursing care.”
• “Nurses are the health professionals
having the most sustained and intense
interaction with women in the maternity
cycle.”
• Maternal role attainment is an
interactional and developmental process
occurring over time. The mother
becomes attached to her infant, acquires
competence in the caretaking tasks
involved in the role, and expresses
pleasure and gratification. (Mercer,
1986).
• Provides proper health care
interventions for nontraditional mothers
for them to favorably adopt a strong
maternal identity.
Merle H. Mishel
• Uncertainty in Illness Theory
• Presents a comprehensive structure to
view the experience of acute and chronic
illness and organize nursing
interventions to promote optimal
adjustment.
• Describes how individuals form meaning
from illness-related situations.
• The original theory’s concepts were
organized in a linear model around the
following three major themes:
Antecedents of uncertainty, Process of
uncertainty appraisal, and Coping with
uncertainty.
Pamela G. Reed
• Self-Transcendence Theory
• Self-transcendence refers to the
fluctuation of perceived boundaries that
extend the person (or self) beyond the
immediate and constricted views of self
and the world (Reed, 1997).
• Has three basic concepts: vulnerability,
self-transcendence, and well-being.
• Gives insight into the developmental
nature of humans associated with health
circumstances connected to nursing
care.
Carolyn L. Wiener and Marylin J. Dodd
• Theory of Illness Trajectory
• “The uncertainty surrounding a chronic
illness like cancer is the uncertainty of
life writ large. By listening to those who
are tolerating this exaggerated
uncertainty, we can learn much about
the trajectory of living.”
• Provides a framework for nurses to
understand how cancer patients stand
uncertainty manifested as a loss of
control.
• Provides new knowledge on how
patients and families endure uncertainty
and work strategically to reduce
uncertainty through a dynamic flow of
illness events, treatment situations, and
varied players involved in care
organization.
Georgene Gaskill Eakes, Mary Lermann Burke, and
Margaret A. Hainsworth
• Theory of Chronic Sorrow
• “Chronic sorrow is the presence of
pervasive grief-related feelings that have
been found to occur periodically
throughout the lives of individuals with
chronic health conditions, their family
caregivers and the bereaved.”
• This middle-range theory defines the
aspect of chronic sorrow as a normal
response to the ongoing disparity
created by the loss.
Phil Barker
• Barker’s Tidal Model of Mental
Health Recovery is widely used in
mental health nursing.
• It focuses on nursing’s fundamental care
processes, is universally applicable, and
is a practical guide for psychiatry and
mental health nursing.
• Draws on values about relating to
people and help others in their
moments of distress. The values of the
Tidal Model are revealed in the Ten
Commitments: Value the voice, Respect
the language, Develop genuine curiosity,
Become the apprentice, Use the
available toolkit, Craft the step beyond,
Give the gift of time, Reveal personal
wisdom, Know that change is constant,
and Be transparent.
Katharine Kolcaba
• Theory of Comfort
• “Comfort is an antidote to the stressors
inherent in health care situations today,
and when comfort is enhanced, patients
 and families are strengthened for the
tasks ahead. Also, nurses feel more
satisfied with the care they are giving.”
• Patient comfort exists in three forms:
relief, ease, and transcendence. These
comforts can occur in four contexts:
physical, psychospiritual, environmental,
and sociocultural.
• As a patient’s comfort needs change, the
nurse’s interventions change, as well.
Cheryl Tatano Beck
• Postpartum Depression Theory
• “The birth of a baby is an occasion for
joy—or so the saying goes […] But for
some women, joy is not an option.”
• Described nursing as a caring profession
with caring obligations to persons we
care for, students, and each other.
• Provides evidence to understand and
prevent postpartum depression.
Kristen M. Swanson
• Theory of Caring
• “Caring is a nurturing way of relating to
a valued other toward whom one feels a
personal sense of commitment and
responsibility.”
• Defines nursing as informed caring for
the well-being of others.
• Offers a structure for improving up-to-
date nursing practice, education, and
research while bringing the discipline to
its traditional values and caring-healing
roots.
Cornelia M. Ruland and Shirley M. Moore
of Basic Human Needs. It is based on
Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation,
whose primary concept is the hierarchy
of Basic Human Needs (BHN).
• Horta’s Theory of Basic Human Needs is
considered the highest point of her
work, and the summary of all her
research concludes sickness as a science
and art of assisting a human being in
meeting basic human needs, making the
patient independent of this assistance
through education in recovery,
maintenance, and health promotion.
• Classified basic human needs into three
main dimensions – psychobiological,
psychosocial and psychospiritual – and
establishes a relationship between the
concepts of human being, environment,
and nursing.
• The theory describes nursing as an
element of a healthcare team and states
that it can function efficiently through a
scientific method. Horta referred this
method as the nursing process.
• She defined the nursing process as the
dynamics of systematic and interrelated
actions to assist human beings. It is
characterized by six phases: nursing
history, nursing diagnosis, assistance
plan, care plan or nursing prescription,
evolution, and prognosis.

• Peaceful End-of-Life Theory

• The focus was not on death itself but on
providing a peaceful and meaningful
living in the time that remained for
patients and their significant others.
• The purpose was to reflect the
complexity involved in caring for
terminally ill patients.
Wanda de Aguiar Horta

• Also known as Wanda Horta, she

introduced the concepts of nursing that
are accepted in Brazil.
• Wrote the book Nursing Process which
presents relevance to the various fields
of Nursing practice for providing a
holistic view of the patient.
• Her work was recognized in all the
teaching institutions called the Theory