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Joyce Travelbee: Human To Human Relationship Model

Joyce Travelbee was a nursing theorist born in 1926 known for developing the Human-to-Human Relationship Model of Nursing. The model is based on existentialism and logotherapy and focuses on building relationships between nurses and patients through five phases: original encounter, emerging identities, empathy, sympathy, and rapport. The goal is for nurses to help patients find meaning in suffering and maintain hope through these relationships in order to improve health outcomes. Travelbee's theory emphasized the importance of human relationships in nursing and influenced hospice care approaches.

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Karlo Gil Concepcion
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855 views3 pages

Joyce Travelbee: Human To Human Relationship Model

Joyce Travelbee was a nursing theorist born in 1926 known for developing the Human-to-Human Relationship Model of Nursing. The model is based on existentialism and logotherapy and focuses on building relationships between nurses and patients through five phases: original encounter, emerging identities, empathy, sympathy, and rapport. The goal is for nurses to help patients find meaning in suffering and maintain hope through these relationships in order to improve health outcomes. Travelbee's theory emphasized the importance of human relationships in nursing and influenced hospice care approaches.

Uploaded by

Karlo Gil Concepcion
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Joyce Travelbee

1926 – 1973

Human to Human
Relationship Model

Joyce Travelbee was born in 1926 and is known for her work as a nursing
theorist. In 1956, Travelbee earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from
Louisiana State University. She was given a Master of Science in Nursing degree in
1959 from Yale University. Her career dealt predominantly with psychiatric nursing and
education. She worked as a psychiatric nursing instructor at the DePaul Hospital
Affiliate School in New Orleans, Louisiana, and worked later in the Charity Hospital
School of Nursing in Louisiana State University, New York University, and the University
of Mississippi.
Travelbee developed the Human-to-Human Relationship Model of Nursing. The
theory was presented in her book, Interpersonal Aspects of Nursing, which was
published in 1961. She wrote about illness, suffering, pain, hope, communication,
interaction, empathy, sympathy, rapport and therapeutic use of self.
The assumptions of the model are based on Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of
existentialism and Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. Existentialism places the accountability
for people’s choices in life on the people who make those choices. Logotherapy, which
was first proposed in Frankl’s Man’s Searching for Meaning (1963), is a form of
psychotherapy that makes the assumption that fulfillment is the best protection against
emotional instability.
The main concepts of the nursing theory are suffering, meaning, nursing, hope,
communications, self-therapy, and a targeted intellectual approach. Each of these
concepts is defined by Travelbee to help nurses understand the model.
Suffering ranges from a feeling of unease to extreme torture, and varies in
intensity, duration, and depth. The role of nursing in Travelbee’s theory is to help the
patient find meaning in the experience of suffering, as well as help the patient maintain
hope. Hope is defined as a faith that can and will bring change that will bring something
better with it.

Travelbee believed that nursing was accomplished through human to human


relationships that began with (1) the original encounter, which progressed through
stages of (2) emerging identities, (3) developing feelings of empathy and, later, (4)
sympathy, until the (5) nurse and patient attained rapport in the final stage, which is
essential to successful patient care, and this relationship is established by an interaction
process.
Building the patient-nurse relationship takes place in five phases: the original
encounter, the visibility of personal or emerging identities, empathy, sympathy, and the
establishment of mutual understanding and a rapport.
In this theory, health is both subjective and objective. Subjective health is an
individually-defined state of wellbeing in accordance with self-appraisal of the physical-
emotional-spiritual status. Objective health, on the other hand, is the absence of any
discernible disease, disability, or defect as measured by physical examination, lab tests,
and assessment by a spiritual director or psychological counselor.
This theory has greatly influenced hospice nursing in that hospice nurses focus
on the relationships with their patients to improve quality of life. Travelbee’s theory
extended the interpersonal relationship theories of Peplau and Orlando, but her unique
synthesis of their ideas differentiated her work in terms of the therapeutic human
relationship between nurse and patient.

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