JOYCE TRAVELBEE (1926–1973)

Human-to-Human Relationship Model

“A nurse does not only seek to alleviate physical pain or render physical care –

she ministers to the whole person. The existence of the suffering whether

physical, mental or spiritual is the proper concern of the nurse.”

- Joyce Travelbee

Life Story

• A psychiatric nurse, educator and writer born in 1926.

• 1956, she completed her BSN degree at Louisiana State University

• 1959, she completed her Master of Science Degree in Nursing at Yale

University

• She started Doctoral program in Florida in 1973. Unfortunately, she was not

able to finish it because she died later that year. She passed away at the prime

age of 47 after a brief sickness.

• Human to human Relationship Model

 • Assist the person, family, or community to avert or palliate the experiences of

sickness and suffering—instilling hope as a maximum goal.

• Hope being a mental state with a yearning to finalize or reach a purpose, with

an expectation of gaining that which is desired.

• Human-to-Human relationships serve to define and make proficient the

practice of nursing.

• Recognizing the importance of sympathy, as well as empathy, in order to

develop human-to-human relationships.

• A nurse exhibiting sympathy is an act of courage because the nurse is risking

pain, and one should recognize the dangers involved in sympathy, such as

over-identification, a distorted sense of pity, causing harm to the patient,

becoming too soft hearted, or being will paralyzer to the patient.

• Involves working through the phases of initial encounter, emerging identity,

empathy, sympathy, and rapport.

Interactional Phases of Human-to-Human Relationship Model:

1. Original Encounter

- First impression by the nurse of the sick person and vice-versa.

2. Emerging Identities

- the time when relationship begins

- the nurse and patient perceives each other’s uniqueness

3. Empathy

- the ability to share in the person’s experience

4. Sympathy

- when the nurse wants to lessen the cause of patient’s suffering.

- it goes beyond empathy—“When one sympathizes, one is involved but not

incapacitated by the involvement.”

- Therapeutic use of self

5. Rapport

- Rapport is described as nursing interventions that lessens the patient’s suffering.

- Relation as human being to human being

- “A nurse is able to establish rapport because she possesses the necessary knowledge

and skills required to assist ill persons and because she is able to perceive, respond to

and appreciate the uniqueness of the ill human being.”