Emocionalidade

Caring Made Visible
Kristen M. Swanson, RN, PhD, FAAN, is associate professor at the Department of Family and Child Nursing, University of Washington. She has developed a theory on the “Five Caring Processes of Nursing,” which she discusses below with Pat Jakobsen, RN, BSN, a member of the CNJ Editorial Advisory Board. Later, Mary Koloroutis, RN, MS, director of Clinical and Professional Development at 910-bed Abbott Northwestern Hospital, shares how her organization has applied the Five Caring Processes. An abbreviated version of this interview was published in Creative Nursing, 4:4.
Jakobsen: Kristen, you have designed a theory that translates caring into five visible actions, or processes. Tell us about your theory and how you came up with it. Swanson: I started with a deep interest in understanding what it was like for women to miscarry. I was a doctoral student and, when I approached my chairperson, Dr. Jean Watson, who founded the Center for Human Caring in Colorado, she told me that she would work with me if I would explore what caring meant from the perception of women who miscarried. At the end of that study, I suggested there were five basic processes — knowing, being with, doing for, enabling and maintaining belief. At the time I defined them differently, tied to the context of miscarriage. So for example, I defined “knowing” as “describing the woman’s desire to have others understand the meaning of miscarriage in her life.” That went on to become, “striving to understand an event as it has meaning in the life of the other.” So you see the progress of the definitions — from the angle of the one who is cared for to the angle of those caring and of their intent. The second study was a post-doctoral study done at the University of Washington, with Dr. Kathryn Barnard. The intention at that point, I had gone on to have my second child, who was not well at birth and ended up at a newborn intensive care unit. That had actually happened at Denver. I had some