AIMS: The aim of this study was to describe the nurse-patient relationships and to study how caring behaviours were described. The review question was: What factors influence the caring relationship between a nurse and patient? BACKGROUND: There is a growing perception that nurses fail to provide compassionate and competent care. Policy documents prescribe compassion as an essential aspect of care; however, the evidence drawn on remains unclear and without clear applications to practice.
AIM: The aim of this paper is to propose a guideline for spiritual assessment and interventions explicitly for families, while considering each family member's unique spirituality. BACKGROUND: Spirituality's positive effect is pervasive in health care and in the lives of many families; therefore, there is a need to integrate spiritual assessment and interventions in total family care. DISCUSSION: The majority of published guidelines on spiritual assessment and interventions are designed predominantly for individuals.
Parish nursing is an emerging area of specialized professional nursing practice that focuses on health maintenance and health promotion for parishioners and the community. Health care occurs across a continuum along which hospitals provide a key function. There is a role for hospitals in relation to parish nursing and faith-based health care organizations have a greater obligation than secular ones to partner with parish nursing programs.
After some exploration of caring as a socio-historical construct, the author examines the changing conception of caring in nursing between Florence Nightingale's day and our own. The place of the older and emergent meanings in the work of some of the recognized nursing theorists is critically examined. A distinction is drawn between a science for caring and a science of caring and some of the problems of conceptualizing and developing a science of caring are explored.
The words 'nurse' and 'nursing' originate in the word 'nurture' which dates back to the 14th century. 'Nurturance' appeared for the first time in the 1976 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary and in a United States dictionary in 1983. Etymologically and semantically bound to nursing, little is known about the term nurturance.
The final phase of a research project is the communication of findings in a manner that is acceptable within the scholarly norms of a scientific community. While there exists in nursing a willingness to embrace many forms of inquiry, there remains a hesitancy to communicate study outcomes in alternative formats that are congruent with the innovative methods employed. This article serves a dual purpose.
This paper explores nursing's current fascination with defining and exploring the term 'caring'. Fear of caring is proposed as the reason for this fascination. Factors at the root of this fear are identified and an expanded definition of caring (one which arises from the dispelling of such fear) is proposed. This expanded definition is given a new label--loving. For, as this author contends, has not loving always been at the heart of nursing?
This paper aims to explore the meaning of spirituality in relation to nursing care using concept synthesis. Walker and Avant give three ways in which concept synthesis can occur: discovering new dimensions to old concepts, searching for similarities and discrepancies among sets of related concepts, and observing previously undescribed phenomena. It is the first two of these methods which have been used here.
Contemporary developments in nursing and health-care, which emphasise evidence-based and outcome-oriented practice often fail to recognise the centrality of the caring relationship in everyday practice. This paper aims to examine the therapeutic role of the nurse within the context of an increasingly technicalized and bureaucratic healthcare system. Focusing on the importance of love and its healing potential, we intend to raise awareness of some difficult and often polemic arguments pertaining to the concept of clinical caritas.
Caring as a virtue and an act of ethics is from both a natural and a professional point of view inseparably related to love as a universal/ontological value. Love is shown, like suffering and death, to be a concept of universal or metacharacter. From current nursing/caring science as well as from ethical and philosophical perspectives, this paper explores how love can be visible in caring through virtue and that the art of caring creates its evidence.