Caring In Nursing

Caring has been a primal concept and the heart of nursing since before it became recognized as a profession. The word “nursing” itself means to nurture or care (Smith, Turkel & Wolf, 2013) and so in my opinion, it is not possible to respond to the calls of nursing without caring at its forefront. This unit’s readings have not changed by views, but rather enhanced them. I have learned about the historical debate that has taken place with those who oppose caring as being part of the unique perspective of nursing. For example, Mary Jane Smith argues that caring is present in many professions, not only in nursing, and so it is not unique to nursing (Smith et al., 2013). While it is true that caring is used in all types of professions and ultimately in all human relations, nursing is the only discipline that is developing knowledge about how caring “facilitates health, healing and the quality of life” (Smith et al., 2013).

The concepts of practice discipline, human
As a practice discipline, we use care in all nursing situations during our everyday practice. We show care through specific nursing actions such as patient teaching and advocacy, attentive listening or just “being there.” However, we must possess a certain amount of technical knowledge and skills in health and illness as a basis for these caring actions (Smith et al., 2013), which is where the discipline side of nursing comes in. As a human science aspect, we can infer that caring is a human trait and part of our nature, thus we all have the potential to care (Smith et al., 2013). Nursing takes it one step further in that we use our scientific knowledge of illness to individualize our care specific to our patient’s unique needs. The different patterns of knowing: personal, empirical, ethical and esthetic, further explain caring. Personal knowing requires the one caring be aware of