Theorist Focus / Development Views of Components
Developed and described the first Person: An individual with vital
Florence Nightingale theory of nursing. She focused the
(1860), on changing and manipulating the
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, environment in order to put the
What It Is Not. patient in best possible conditions
for nature to act. She believed that
in the nurturing environment, the
body could repair itself. Client’s
environment is manipulated to
include appropriate noise,
nutrition, hygiene, light, comfort,
socialization and hope.
Hildegard Peplau She identifies four phases of the
(1952), nurse-client relationship namely:
Interpersonal Relations in ORIENTATION,
Nursing. IDENTIFICATION,
EXPLOITATION, RESOLUTION.
Virginia Henderson She identified fourteen basic
(1955) needs. She postulated that the
The Nature of Nursing. unique function of the nurse is to
assist the clients, sick or well, in
the performance of those
activities contributing to health or
its recovery, that clients would
perform unaided if they had the
necessary strength, will or
knowledge.
reparative processes to deal with
disease.
Environment: External
conditions that affect life and
individuals development.
Health: Focus is on the
reparative process of getting well.
Nursing: Goal is to place the
individual in the best condition
for good healthcare.
P: An organism striving to reduce
tension generated by needs.
E: The interpersonal process is
always included, and
psychodynamic milieu receives
attention, with emphasis on the
client’s culture and mores.
H: Ongoing human process that
implies forward movement of
personality and other ongoing
human processes in the direction
of creative, constructive,
productive, personal, and
community living.
N: Interpersonal therapeutic
process that “functions
cooperatively with others human
processes that make health
possible for individuals in
communities. Nursing is an
educative instrument, a maturing
force that aims to promote
forward movement of personality.
P: Individual requiring assistance
to achieve health and
independence or a peaceful death.
Mind and body are inseparable.
E: All external conditions and
influences that affect life and
development.
H: Equated with independence,
viewed in terms of the client’s
ability to perform 14 components
of nursing care unaided:
breathing, eating, drinking,
maintaining comfort, sleeping,
resting clothing, maintaining body
temperature, ensuring safety,
communicating,
worshiping, working, recreation,

Faye Glenn Abdellah To deliver nursing care for the
(1960), whole individual.
Patient Centered Approaches
to Nursing.
Ida Jean Orlando She believed that the nurse helps
(1961) patients meet a perceived needs
The Dynamic Nurse-Patient that the patient cannot meet for
Relationship. themselves. To interact with
clients to meet immediate needs
by identifying client behaviors,
nurse’s reactions, and nursing
actions to take.
Lydia Hall To provide professional nursing
(1964), care to people past the acute stage
Nursing: What Is It? of illness. She conceptualized
three components of Nursing:
CARE, CORE, and CURE. Care
represents nurturance and is
exclusive to nursing. Core
involves the therapeutic use of self
and emphasizes the use of
reflection. Cure focuses on
nursing related to the physician’s
order.
Ernestine Wiedenbach To assist the individuals in
(1964), overcoming obstacles that prevent
Clinical Nursing – A Helping meeting healthcare needs. She
Art. advocated that the nurse’s
individual philosophy or central
and continuing development.
N: Assists and supports the
individual in life activities and the
attainment of independence.
P: The recipients of nursing care
having physical, emotional, and
sociologic needs that may be overt
or covert.
E: Not clearly defined. Some
discussion indicates that clients
interact with their environment,
of which nurse is a part.
H: a state when the individual has
no unmet needs and no
anticipated or actual impairment.
N: Broadly grouped in “21 nursing
problems,” which center needs for
hygiene, comfort, activity, rest,
safety, oxygen, nutrition,
elimination, hydration, physical
and emotional health promotion,
interpersonal relationships, and
development of self-awareness.
Nursing care is doing something
for an individual.
P: Unique individual behaving
verbally nonverbally. Assumption
is that individuals are at times
able to meet their own needs and
at other times unable to do so.
Assumption is that being
without emotional or physical
discomfort and having a sense of
well-being contribute to a healthy
state.
N: Professional nursing is
conceptualized as finding out and
meeting the client’s immediate
need for help.
P: Client is composed of body,
pathology, and person. People set
their own goals and are capable of
learning and growing.
E: Should facilitate achievement
of the client’s personal goals.
H: Development of a mature self-
identity that assists in the
conscious selection of actions that
facilitate growth.
N: Caring is the nurse’s primary
function. Professional nursing is
most important during the
recuperative period.
P: Any individual who is receiving
help from a member of the health
profession or from a worker in the
field of health.
E: Not specifically addressed.

Joyce Travelbee
(1966, 1971),
Interpersonal Aspects of
Nursing.
Martha Rogers
(1970),
The Science of Unitary Man.
Imogene M. King
(1971, 1981),
Open Systems Model, Goal
Attainment Theory.
Betty Neuman (1972, 1982,
1989, 1992)
purpose lends credence to nursing
care. She believed that nurses
meet the individual’s need for
help through identification of
needs, administration of help, and
validation that actions were
helpful. Components of clinical
practice: Philosophy, Purpose,
Practice and an Art.
To assist individuals, families,
communities, and groups to
prevent or cope with illness,
regain health, finding meaning in
illness, or maintaining, maximal
degree of health. She further
viewed that interpersonal process
is a human-to-human relationship
formed during illness and
“experience of suffering”.
To assist the client in achieving a
maximum level of wellness. To
Rogers, unitary man is an energy
field in constant interaction with
the environment. She asserted
that human beings are more than
and different from the sum if their
parts; the distinctive properties of
the whole are significantly
different from its parts.
Furthermore, she believed that
human being is characterized by
the capacity for abstraction and
imagery, language and thought,
sensation and emotion.
To communication to help the
client reestablish a positive
adaptation to his or her
environment. She described
nursing as a helping profession
that assists individuals and
groups in society to attain,
maintain, and restore health. If
this is not possible, nurses help
individuals die with dignity.
In addition, King viewed nursing
as an interaction process between
client and nurse whereby during
perceiving, setting goals, and
acting on them, transactions
occur and goals are achieved.
To address the effects of stress
and reactions to it on the
H: Concepts of nursing, client,
and need for help and their
relationships imply health-related
concerns in the nurse—client
relationship..
N: the nurse is a functional
human being who acts, thinks,
and feels. All actions, thoughts,
and feelings underlie what the
nurse does.
P: A unique, irreplaceable
individual who is in a continuous
process of becoming, evolving,
and changing.
H: Heath includes the individual’s
perceptions of health and the
absence of disease.
N: An interpersonal process
whereby the professional nurse
practitioner assists an individual,
family, or community to prevent
or cope with the experience of
illness and suffering, and if
necessary, to find meaning in
these experiences.
P: Unitary man, a four-
dimensional energy field.
E: Encompasses all that is outside
any given human field. Person
exchanging matter and energy.
H: Not specifically addressed, but
emerges out of interaction
between human and environment,
moves forward, and maximizes
human potential.
N: A learned profession that is
both science and art. The
professional practice of nursing is
creative and imaginative and
exists to serve people.
P: Biopsychosocial being.
E: Internal and external
environment continually interacts
to assist in adjustments to change.
H: A dynamic life experience with
continued goal attainment and
adjustment to stressors.
N: Perceiving, thinking, relating,
judging, and acting with an
individual who comes to a
nursing situations.
P: A client system that is
composed of physiologic,
The Neuman System Model development and maintenance of
or Health Care System health. The concern of nursing is
Model. to prevent stress invasion, to
protect the client’s basic structure
and to obtain or maintain a
maximum level of wellness. The
nurse helps the client, through
primary, secondary, and tertiary
prevention modes, to adjust to
environmental stressors and
maintain client stability
Myra Estrin Levine To use conservation activities
(1973), aimed at optimal use of client’s
Conservation Model. resources. She advocated that
nursing is a human interaction
and proposed 4 conservation
principles of nursing which are
concerned with the unity and
integrity of the individual. FOUR
CONSERVATION
PRINCIPLES:1.Conservation of
energy2.Conservation of
structural integrity3.Conservation
of personal
integrity4.Conservation of social
integrity.
Sister Callista Roy To identify the types and
(1979) demands placed on a client and
Adaptation Model. client’s adaptation to the
demands.
Jean Watson To focus on curative factors
(1979) derived from a humanistic
Nursing: Human Science and perspective and from scientific
Human CareHuman Caring knowledge.
Model.
Dorothy E. Johnson To reduce stress so the client can
(1980), recover as quickly as possible.
The Behavioral System According to Johnson, each
Model for Nursing. person as a behavioral system is
psychological, sociocultural, and
environmental variables.
E: Internal and external forces
surrounding humans at any time.
H: Health or wellness exists if all
parts and subparts are in harmony
with the whole person. N: Nursing
is a unique profession in that it is
concerned with all the variables
affecting an individual’s response
to stressors.
P: a holistic being.
E: Broadly, includes all the
individual’s experiences.
H: The maintenance of the client’s
unity and integrity.
N: A discipline rooted in the
organic dependency of the
individual human being on his or
her relationship with others.
P: Biopsychological beign and the
recipient of nursing care.
E: All conditions, circumstances,
and influences surrounding and
affecting the development of an
organism or groups of organisms.
H: The person encounters
adaptation problems in changing
the environment.
N: A theoretical system of
knowledge that prescribes a
process of analysis and action
related to the care of the ill or
potentially ill persons.
P: A valued being to be cared for,
respected, nurtured, understood,
and assisted, a fully functional,
integrated self.
E: Social environment, caring and
the culture of caring affect health.
H: Physical, mental, and social
wellness.
N: A human science of people and
human health; illness experiences
that are mediated by professional,
personal, scientific, aesthetic, and
ethical human care transactions.
P: A system of interdependent
parts with patterned, repetitive,
and purposeful ways of behaving.
E: All forces that affect the person
 composed of seven subsystems and that influence the behavioral
namely: INGESTIVE, system.
ELIMINATIVE, AFFILIATIVE,
AGGRESSIVE, DEPENDENCE,
ACHIEVEMENT, and SEXUAL
AND ROLE IDENTITY.In H: Focus on person, not ill ness.
addition, she viewed that each Health is a dynamic state
person strives to achieve balance influenced by biologic,
and stability both internally and psychological, and social factors.
externally and to function N: Promotion of behavioral
effectively by adjusting and system, balance and stability. An
adapting to environmental forces art and a science providing
through learned pattern of external assistance before and
response. Furthermore, She during balance disturbances.
believed that the patient strives to
become a person whose behavior
is commensurate with social
demands; who is able to modify
his behavior in ways that support
biologic imperatives; who is able
to benefit to the fullest extent
during illness from the health care
professional’s knowledge and
skills; and whose behavior does
not give evidence of unnecessary
trauma as a consequence of
illness.

Rosemarie Rizzo Parse
(1981),
Man-Living-Health:Theory of
NursingHuman Becoming
Theory.
To focus on human as living unity
and human’s qualitative
participation with health
experience. She emphasized free
choice of personal meaning in
relating value priorities, co-
creating of rhythmical patterns, in
exchange with the environment
and contranscending in many
dimensions as possibilities unfold.
She also believed that each choice
opens certain opportunities while
closing others. Thus, referred to
revealing-concealing, enabling-
limiting, and connecting-
separating. Since each individual
makes his or her own personal
choices, the role of the nurse is
that of guide, not decision maker.
P: A major reason for nursing
existence.
E: Man and environment
interchange energy to create what
is in the world, and man chooses
the meaning given to the
situations he creates.
H: A lived experience that is a
process of being and becoming.
N: Nursing Practice is directed
toward illuminating and
mobilizing family
interrelationships in light of the
meaning assigned to health and
its possibilities as language in the
cocreated patterns of relating.