Why the Human Side of Nursing Can’t Be Automated

Ned Brower started his nursing career as an EMT in Los Angeles. Two years later, Brower earned his master’s degree. Coincidentally, he started his post in the ER at the same time the global COVID-19 pandemic hit. Brower called it a “trial by fire in the ER.”

Fans of the HBO Max series The Pitt will know Brower as Nurse Jesse Van Horn. Yes, a real nurse playing a trauma nurse. That’s virtually unheard of in Hollywood, where everything is make-believe.

And that’s why The Pitt has been lauded for its close-to-real-life portrayal of the ER. No made-up diagnoses. No added drama to fuel streaming ratings. No romanticized versions of the work nurses do.

Brower is as real as they come. The exhausted, deflated look is humanized with a side of nose rings and tattoos. During a 2025 interview with PEOPLE, he said that after season one ended, he went back to nursing.

The Algorithm Can Chart. It Can’t Sit With Someone.

Brower’s medical expertise still counts. What you see onscreen is exactly how he would approach a real-life scenario: Nurses do the intensive work. AI supplements that.

What people don’t see is the assumption, creeping into budget meetings, that if a machine can do the task, it can do the care.

Nursing theory has been arguing against that conflation long before anyone said “large language model.” It turns out to be a good rulebook for figuring out what belongs to the algorithm and what belongs to the nurse.

What Nursing Theory Means by ‘Caring’

Caring is the core of nursing, and many nursing theories highlight how it can help them serve patients better.

Jean Watson’s Theory and Philosophy of Human Caring began with her Ten Carative Factors and later evolved into the Clinical Caritas Process, framing caring as a human, transpersonal relationship.

When nurses apply them, care becomes more than a checklist. It becomes an encounter. One built on trust, presence, and attention to a patient’s beliefs, fears, and spiritual needs.

That’s not a soft add-on to clinical competence. The review treats it as the mechanism through which humanized care happens.

Two Theories, One Conclusion

Nurse Education in Practice examined three dominant theories of caring alongside the two paradigmatic expressions of it: touch and presence.

The paper landed on a blunt conclusion: AI, at least for the foreseeable future, cannot care in the sense nursing ethics requires. The authors argued that AI must support the nurse’s ability to deliver the human parts of care, not absorb them.

Where the Line Sits

A newer bioethics analysis published in BMC Medical Ethics makes the mechanism explicit.

Genuine caregiving requires context-sensitive responsiveness, relational uptake, and answerability. AI can simulate the appearance of empathy through conversational tone, but it doesn’t have first-person experience behind it.

Patients seem to notice.

In one cited experiment, people randomized into AI-only care reported lower trust and satisfaction than those with a human clinician present, even when the diagnostics were accurate. The absence of a person wasn’t read as efficiency. It was read as a loss of accountability.

Touch tells a similar story.

Robotic touch interventions have shown real physiological effects. Yet participants in controlled studies still rated human touch as more comforting than mechanically identical robotic touch. A notable share found robotic touch uncomfortable outright.

Why This is Crucial for Practice

None of this makes AI the enemy. Used well, it frees nurses from the administrative sludge that eats into bedside time.

Nursing education already treats this as foundational and centers the curriculum around “care for the whole person.” That goes for conventional degrees and beyond, since many nurses opt for remote learning these days.

Even remote accelerated online BSN programs pair hundreds of clinical hours with theory-grounded practice no software update can substitute for.

Cleveland State University explains how these fast-track programs prepare aspiring nurses to enter the industry with the right skills for the job.

Why Nursing Specifically Resists Replacement

A 2024 analysis published in Women’s Health Nursing posed the question to nurses. As AI moves from EHR data science to disease prediction and monitoring tools, can it substitute for the nurse herself?

The paper’s answer is grounded in what nursing consists of:

• Fall prevention
• Deterioration recognition
• Discharge teaching
• Accumulated clinical judgment that produces new nursing diagnoses in the first place

AI can extend that work. It doesn’t originate it. A 2025 protocol in BMJ Open adds a workforce angle. Nurses, the largest slice of the healthcare workforce, have adopted AI-driven tools more slowly than other clinical groups.

Not from technophobia, but because prior research on decision-support systems shows adoption depends on whether a tool is trusted to support judgment rather than replace it.

Empathy Cannot Be Replicated

Nursing theory has spent decades defining caring as relational, embodied, and answerable. Jean Watson’s Theory of Human Caring makes this distinction particularly clear: nursing is not simply about completing clinical tasks; it is about creating a caring relationship through presence, compassion, and attention to the whole person.

AI can extend a nurse’s reach. It can’t replace the nurse who notices the patient hasn’t made eye contact in an hour. Or the patient who holds a hand because the moment calls for it.

That distinction isn’t nostalgia. It’s the job.

And who knows, maybe The Pitt will delve into AI taking over clinical work in later seasons. Until then, Ned Brower will keep his day job and his acting career.

Looking for Your Next Nursing Opportunity?

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Explore the Scrub Society Job Board to find travel nursing and healthcare opportunities that fit your experience, goals, and next career move.