Chapter 7: Caring in Nursing Practice

Vocabulary flashcards covering theories, behaviors, assessment tools, and clinical applications of caring in nursing practice.

Caring

A universal phenomenon that influences the way people think, feel, and behave, serving as the heart of a nurse's ability to work with patients in a respectful and therapeutic way.

Benner's Primacy of Caring

A theory holding that caring is the essence of excellent nursing practice and that caring practices are specific and relational for each unique encounter.

Leninger's Transcultural Caring

A theoretical view identifying caring as an essential human need that improves the human condition and sets nursing apart from other healthcare disciplines.

Watson's Transpersonal Caring

A theory that positions caring as the central focus of nursing, places care before cure, and emphasizes meaningful conversations.

Swanson's Theory of Caring

A theory defining caring as a nurturing way of relating to an individual, structured around five distinct caring processes.

Swanson's Caring Processes

The five interrelated caring categories defined by Swanson: knowing, being with, doing for, enabling, and maintaining belief.

Enabling

An aspect and process of caring in Swanson's theory that facilitates a patient's passage through life transitions and unfamiliar events.

Context of Illness

The total personal background and situation of a patient's illness, understanding which allows the nurse to select and individualize interventions that effectively assist the patient.

Caring Assessment Tool (CAT)

A clinical assessment instrument measuring patient perception of caring using items beginning with the prompt: 'Since I have been a patient here, the nurse(s)'.

Ethic of Caring

A clinical philosophy positioning the nurse as a patient advocate who resolves ethical dilemmas through relationships, remains sensitive to power imbalances, and prioritizes each patient as a unique being.

Providing Presence

A person-to-person caring encounter conveying closeness and security through 'being with', eye contact, body language, tone of voice, listening, availability, and reassurance.

Noncontact Touch

A form of nonverbal communication and touch delivered through eye contact rather than physical contact.

Contact Touch

Physical skin-to-skin contact between a nurse and a patient that provides comfort and creates a therapeutic connection.

Categories of Touch in Nursing

The four clinical categories through which touch is applied: task-oriented touch, caring touch, protective touch, and therapeutic touch.

Listening (in Caring)

A dedicated interpersonal caring behavior that fosters trust, opens lines of communication, and establishes a mutual nurse-patient relationship.

Knowing the Patient

The core of clinical decision making and patient-centered care, facilitated by continuity of care and clinical expertise, encompassing knowledge of patient therapy responses, habits, coping resources, and physical endurance.

Spiritual Caring

Nursing care that provides a sense of connectedness and helps a person find balance between their life values, goals, and belief systems and those of others.

Relieving Symptoms and Suffering

Caring nursing actions giving the patient comfort, dignity, respect, and peace while soothing the care environment and supporting the family through a nonjudgmental presence.

Family Care

A principle of nursing practice recognizing that caring for an individual includes their family, encouraging family caregivers to actively participate, and acknowledging illness-induced stress on relatives.

Challenges to Caring

Systemic and environmental obstacles in healthcare including task-oriented biomedical models, institutional demands, time constraints, technology reliance, cost-effective strategies, and standardized work processes.