The Philosophy and Science of Caring, which was published in 2008. She currently holds an endowed chair at the University of Colorado, and in 2008, she created the Watson Caring Science Institute to help spread her nursing theory and ideas.
Jean Watson was born in a small, close-knit town in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia in the 1940s. Jean Watson graduated from the Lewis Gale School of Nursing in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1961. She continued her nursing studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a B.S. in 1964, an M.S. in psychiatric and mental health nursing in 1966, and a Ph.D. in educational psychology and counseling in 1973.
Jean Watson's Philosophy and Science of Caring addresses how nurses express care to their patients. Caring is central to nursing practice, and promotes health better than a simple medical cure. She believes that a holistic approach to health care is central to the practice of caring in nursing.
According to Watson, caring, which is manifested in nursing, has existed in every society. However, a caring attitude is not transmitted from generation to generation. Instead, it's transmitted by the culture of the nursing profession as a unique way of coping with its environment.
According to her theory, caring can be demonstrated and practiced by nurses. Caring for patients promotes growth; a caring environment accepts a person as he or she is, and looks to what he or she may become.
Caring consists of carative factors. Watson's 10 carative factors are:
1.) The formation of a humanistic- altruistic system of values. 2.) The installation of faith-hope. 3.) The cultivation of sensitivity to one’s self and to others. 4.) The development of a helping-trust relationship. 5.) The promotion and acceptance of the expression of positive and negative feelings. 6. The systematic use of the scientific problem-solving method for decision making. 7. ) The promotion of interpersonal teaching-learning. 8.) The provision for a supportive, protective and /or corrective mental, physical, socio-cultural and spiritual environment. 9.) Assistance with the gratification of human needs. 10.) The allowance for existential-phenomenological forces.