JOYCE TRAVELBEE (Human to Human Relationship Model)

•Born: 1926 (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

•Died: 1973 (Florida, USA)

HUMAN TO HUMAN RELATIONSHIP MODEL

•Everything a nurse said or did with an ill person helped to fulfill the purpose of nursing.
•Nursing is an interpersonal connection whereby the nurse facilitates the progress of a patient,
family, or community in preventing or coping with an illness or with suffering in ways that could
lead to finding meaning with the experience.
•The nurse is responsible for educating and providing strategies to assist the patients in avoiding
or alleviating the distress of unmet needs.
•Purpose of nursing is to assist 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.

Major Concepts
1. Suffering
2. Meaning
3. Hope
4. Communication
5. Therapeutic Use of Self

SUFFERING
•An experience that varies in intensity, duration and depth... a feeling of unease, ranging from
mild, transient mental, physical or mental discomfort to extreme pain and extreme torture.

MEANING
•Meaning is the reason as one self attributes.

HOPE
•Nurse’s job is to help the patient to maintain hope and avoid hopelessness.
•Hope is a faith that can and will be change that will bring something better with it.
•Hope’s core lies in a fundamental trust with the outside world, and a belief that others will help
someone when you need it.
6 IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS OF HOPE
1. Strongly associated with dependence on other people.
2. Future oriented.
3. Linked to elections from several alternatives or escape routes out of its situation.
4. Desire to possess any object or condition, to complete a task or have an experience.
5. Confidence that others will be there for one when you need them.
6. The hoping person is in possession of courage to be able to acknowledge its shortcomings and
fears and go forward towards its goal.

COMMUNICATION
•“strict necessity for good nursing care.”

THERAPEUTIC USE OF SELF

•Self-awareness and self-understanding, understanding of human behavior, the ability to predict
one’s own and other’s behavior are important in this process.

NURSING METAPARADIGMSPERSON
PERSON
-is a human being.
HEALTH
-Health is objective and subjective.
-Subjective health is an individually defined state of well-being in accord with self-appraisal of
physical-emotional-spiritual status.
-Objective health is an absence of discernible disease, disability of defect as measured by physical
examination, laboratory tests and assessment by spiritual director or psychological counselor.
ENVIRONMENT
-Not clearly defined in Travelbee’s theory.
NURSING
-An interpersonal process whereby the professional nurse practitioner assists an individual, family
or community to prevent or cope with experience or illness and suffering and if necessary to find
meaning in these experiences.

Phases
1. ORIGINAL ENCOUNTER- first impression of the nurse of the patient and vice versa.
2. EMERGING IDENTITIES- Nurse and patient perceive each other as unique individuals.
3. EMPATHY- two qualities that enhance empathy are
(1) Similarities of experience; and
(2) Desire to understand the other person.
4. SYMPATHY- happens when the nurse wants to lessen the cause of the patient’s suffering.
5. RAPPORT- establishing mutual understanding and contact- nursing interventions that lessen
patient’s suffering
STRENGTHS OF THEORY
•Can be used by the nurse when dealing with patients in distress and experiencing life changing
events.
•Most useful when working with those who are chronically ill, undergoing long term rehabilitation,
and the dying or terminally ill.

WEAKNESSES OF THEORY
•Works best only for patients willing to invest in the development of rapport.
•Applicable only in conscious patients.