Page 116 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

t h eoret ic al Fra m e w o r k F or C ar it as/c ari n g rel at i on s h i p
Tables 8.1–8.4 can serve as an educational-practice guide for devel-
oping knowledge, skills, and values for Relationship-Centered Caring.
Table 8.2 outlines a framework for Relationship-Centered Caring.
It encompasses the Practitioner Relationship with Self as a foundational
starting point and extends to the Practitioner-Patient Relationship.
The next sections incorporate Practitioner-to-Community Rela-
tionships and Practitioner-to Practitioner Relationships. The goal is to
outline a foundational model for education and practice that will pre-
pare and generate future individual and communities of caring-healing
practitioners—practitioners working together to serve the complex
matrix of individuals’ needs in health, illness, and caring-healing pro-
cesses and outcomes while also continually cultivating and deepening
biogenic relationships with self and other.

Practitioner-to-Community Relationship
The practitioner-to-community relationship acknowledges that
caring and relationship cannot be based solely on an individualistic
model of caring but makes explicit that caring begins with self and radi-
ates out from self to other, to family, community, planet Earth, even
to the cosmos, affecting the entire infinity field of humanity (Levinas
1969; Watson 2005). This notion of caring that extends beyond the
individual is grounded in the Latin word Caritas, conveying caring at a
deeper level than conventional thinking. Caritas conveys connections
between caring and love, allowing for a new form of deep transper-
sonal caring for self and other. This relationship between caring and
love connotes inner processes and extends to nature and the larger uni-
verse (Watson 2004a:13).

Caritas-to-Communitas. In extending caring to a model of Caritas,
or “clinical Caritas” (Watson 2004a), the underlying values are
made explicit. This notion of Caritas/deep caring is consistent with
Nightingale’s sense of “calling” into nursing as a commitment with a
professional and personal covenantal ethic of compassionate human
service guided by an “altruistic-humanistic value system” (Watson
1985). It is acknowledged in this extended framework that caring is
a phenomenon that is to be cherished; it is very fragile, delicate, and

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