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Being a patient advocate even if the patients wishes are not within my personal beliefs. Taking the time to listen so I do understand the patients wishes.
"Caring" A feeling of one or many of the following: compassion, empathy, sympathy, anger, vehemency, advocation, intention, sadness, fear, happiness, protection, enlightenment, love, or passion in direct correlation with the plight/triumph of another human being/entity/idea/culture/population.
Caring is an internal reaction to the above and is often coupled with a sense of need to help physically or emotionally, in an attempt to offer support in a visible way.
Our hospital uses Jean Watson's Caring theory in our nursing philosophy. We have developed our hospital's misson and values around that theory and have defined behaviors that SHOW we care. Among those are introducing yourself to the patient, using appropriate touch and sitting down to be on eye level when conversing (when possible). Values are stewardship, mutual respect, quality, excellence, commitment, integrity, sound judgment and compassion. If you SHOW those values the caring will be understood. Actions speak louder than words, of course.
In the context of nursing as a professional field...
caring: the provision of skilled, professional nursing services to clients.
That's all. "Caring" is not -- within a nursing context -- having heart-felt emotions toward a client. We may or may not have those, but it's not our job. Our job is to provide professional services to the client. If we're not providing those, we're not caring. If we provide them, we are.
For what it's worth, strictly speaking, your definition of caring could be attached to the nurse who is most likely to be sued/referred to BON (from a statistical POV). That is, nurses who have exemplary skills, but are perceived as being less friendly by the patient are sued more often than nurses who might have less refined skills, but who have an emotional level attached to caring, which could indicate a less robotic, and more human component to nursing. For clarification, I'm not saying a person cannot have excellent technical skills and be perceived as having emotional parts of caring.
Let me provide a scenario:
You have a dying patient and he/she asks that you hold their hand. IMO this is an emotional component of caring and not a "skilled, professional nursing service". It's clearly caring for the patient's wholistic needs by providing an emotional service, so to speak.
I did not intent for this to be about your profession only,
I intended this to bring out the warm side of everyone.
To think about how would you personally classify someone as a caring person.
What have you experienced in your life that made you put a lable on someone as a caring person.
Everyone, views and belief are different, I just wanted to address something positive
that we all aspire to provide in our profession and personality
I did not want a response from the book, I wanted a response from the heart!
allnurses.com is the largest community for nurses on the web. We now have over 328,898 members! Join today to network with other nurses, laugh, share, and much more.
What Is Your Definition Of Caring?
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