Josephine Paterson

Biography
• Born first of September of 1924 in Freeport, New York
• She was 5 years old at the time
• Spent her early school years during the depression of the 1930s
• Raised in the east coast where she earned a BScN
• Began her graduate work at Johns Hopkin University
• She was 15 years old when she started learning the role of a nurse as well as work
responsibilities during the time period of the later half of the 1930s. This was
when the Hoover Dam was completed, King Edward VIII abdicates the throne for a
divorcee from the United States, Amelia Earhardt vanished, the Hindenberg caught
fire, the Golden Gate Bridge was finished and opened for traffic, and Hitler
annexed Austria and the tension with the Nazi's and the Jewish population in
Germany was escalating
• She had graduated in August of 1945 with a diploma from Lenox Hill School of
Nursing in New York, within a year of WW2 ending
 Biography
• During the time that she was in her first year of college, a great portion of the young men
had been deployed overseas both in Europe and the Pacific. Rationing of needed supplies for
the war effort was in full swing and more and more women moved out of homemaking and
into the workforce.
• The bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 shocked the nation, and have shaped, to
some extent, the views of Paterson during these formative years and must have had some
impact on her decision to go into the nursing profession
• Nine years later, Josephine Paterson graduated with her Bachelor's Degree in Nursing
Education from St. John's University in Brooklyn, New York
• After moving to Baltimore, Maryland she completed in June, a year later, with her Master's in
Public Health from the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health
• It was during the 1950's and 1960's that Paterson, and together with Loretta Zderad, did their
formative nursing work, the basis from which they would draw from in formulating their
Humanistic Nursing Theory and further refinement in the 70's and 80's. They were just young
adults during this time.
• Paterson worked in the public and mental health field and received her DNS in 1969 from
Boston University with her specialty of psychiatric mental health
• She presented and published most of her work with Zderad in the decades of the 1960's and
1970's
 Relationship with Loretta Zderad
• They met in the 1950s while working at Catholic University,
where their task was to create a new program that would
include Psychiatric and Community Health components as
part of the graduate program
• Their friendship lasted over 35 years
• They shared experiences, ideas, and insights to form a
concept that evolved into the Formal Theory of Humanistic
Nursing
• They first published their book Humanistic Nursing in 1976
• Their initial commitment to creativity conceptualize nursing
constructs developed into "Nursology“,a phenomenolgical
approach to studying nursing as an existential experience
 Humanistic Nursing Theory
• "multidimensional"
• "interactive theory"
• In this theory, the components identified as humans are the patient
(can refer to the person, family, community) and the nurse
• PERSON WHO SENDS CALL FOR HELP IS THE PATIENT
• PERSON WHO RECOGNIZES AND RESPONDS TO THE CALL IS THE
NURSE
• "Dialogue" which provides methodological bridge between theory
and practice
• nurturing of "wellbeing" and "morebeing"
• What happens during this dialogue, the "and" in the "call-and-
response", the between, is nursing.
 PERSON

• person is viewed as an "incarnate being"

always becoming in relation with man and
things in a world of time and space.
• person have the capability of self reflection
 NURSING
• nursing is conceptualized as a lived human
act, a response to a human act, a response to
human situation.
• the dialogical quality of nursing is emphasized;
nursing is viewed as a transaction between
persons.
 HUMANISTIC NURSING
• Transactional relationship whose
meaningfulness demands conceptualization
founded on nurse's existential awareness of
self and the other
• humanistic nursing aims at the development
of human potential, at wellbeing and more
being
 HEALTH
• nursing's concern is said to be 'not merely
with a person's wellbeing but within his
morebeing; with helping him become more as
humanly possible in his particular life
situation.
• wellbeing and morebeing, that health is
conceptualized as somewhat more than the
freedom from disease.
 ENVIRONMENT
-views person as actually living in two worlds.
• an angular, inner world, also described as a
biased or shaded reality.
• the objective world, of persons and things.
openness to and acceptance of the other's
inner world is essential for true interaction
between persons.
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION
• the existential literature, descriptions of what
man has come to know and understand in his
experience, has evolved from the use of the
phenomenological approach.
• in phenomenology a statement's validity is
based on whether or not it describes the
phenomenon accurately.
 Use of Theory in Research
• the phenomenological method is proposed as
a descriptive approach for participants in the
nursing situation to study, interpret, and attest
the nature and meaning of the lived events.
• a group research project that was conducted
in the clinical setting of a psychiatric hospital
by Paterson and Zderad (1998)
• An effort to better understand why some patients
stayed in the day hospital and others left, the nursing
staff conducted a phenomenological study that
investigated the experiences of patients as they enter
and become engaged in treatment in a day hospital
system.
• The initial step in the process, in Dr. Paterson's and Dr.
Zderad's terms, is to prepare the nurse knower for
coming to know.
• Literature was handed out on this and meetings were
held to discuss the articles and any questions about
them. They also shared their feelings about this
method, their concerns, and other experiences related
to this study.
• As they did this, they began to establish an
atmosphere of openness and trust.
• Once the descriptions were obtained, they
interpreted with the phenomenological method
of reflecting, intuiting, analysing, and
synthesizing.
• They interviewed 15 patients over a period of 8
months, on their day of admission and every 4
weeks thereafter until discharge.
• They found from interviews that there were many
anxiety-producing experiences on the first day in
the day hospital, but very few anxiety-reducing
experiences that offered the patient comfort and
support.
• After reviewing the interviews of a patient
who had a particularly difficult course of
treatment, one of the nurses who was on her
treatment team remarked, "We weren't
listening to what she was telling us--we just
didn't hear the pain." Another nurse had a
similar insight into a patient's experinces
• In future interactions with this patient the
nurse was empathic and supportive rather
than judgemental and angry.
 Application to Nursing Practice
• The bounded concern for attention to physical
status gives support for application of the
theory
• The difficulty of continuous "active presence"
with the whole of the nurse's being is
addressed by the theorists
• Have limited applicability in situations in
which the nurse as helper interacts with a
child or comatose patient.