Dr. Jean Watson, known for her work on human caring theory, established the Original Center for Human Caring at the University of Colorado School of Nursing in 1986.

The Center was the nation’s first interdisciplinary center with an overall commitment to develop and use knowledge of human caring and healing as the foundation for transforming the health care system and as a framework for a dramatically new system affirming and sustaining human caring and healing activities as the moral and scientific basis of clinical practice. These research based clinical caring-healing practices are regarded as primary modalities in their own right fostering human integrity, dignity, health, and wholeness and are equally necessary and complementary, yet distinct from biomedical treatment, technology, and cure-focused interventions. Such relationship-centered-caring activities move health professionals beyond competing to collaborating partnerships among themselves and with their patients and communities.

The Original Center developed programs and projects to establish the critical balance between traditional biomedical technology and the human caring activities of the nursing. Center efforts ranged from focused academic-curricular activities in nursing to piloting and investigating new educational research and clinical practice models of caring excellence.

The Center offered formal public and professional forums and institutes, as well as formal intensive modules of course work for credit or non-credit. In addition, the Center hosted resident scholars from humanities and other diverse academic programs, sponsored interdisciplinary and international publications.

The Original Center had four major goals: