Human-to-Human Relationship Model is a nursing theory developed by Joyce Travelbee. The theory is based on Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existentialism and Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. Kierkegaard’s philosophy that is existentialism places the accountability for people’s choices in life on the people who make those choices. Viktor Frankl’s phylosophy, logotherapy assumes that fulfillment is the best protection against emotional instability. The main ideas behind Joyce Travelbee’s model include suffering, meaning, nursing, hope, communications, self-therapy, and a targeted intellectual approach.

Suffering ranges from a feeling of unease to extreme torture, and varies in intensity, duration, and depth. The role of nurses is helping the patient find meaning in the experience of suffering. Nurses also have a role to instill hope to patients. Travelbee believed nursing should be accomplished through human relationships that begin with the original encounter, progress through the stages of emerging identities, and lead to the development of empathy and sympathy. The nurse-patient relationship is essential to successful patient care, and this relationship is established by an interaction process. This model define hope as a faith that can and will bring change that will bring something better with it.

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 well being 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. MLA