Anne Boykin

“ Jason was surely going to ask of the results upon waking from anesthesia. "They always do." Going to sleep unknowing demands waking-to-know. "Honesty."
Honesty as a lived precept of caring requires that I, nurse, must always and ever regard the person nursed from a position of love. I must enter all nursing activity with the sole purpose of using truth, only and ever, to promote the spiritual growth of the person nursed. In this climate of openness to myself and to the other, we can begin to experience freedom from fear. ”

“ The patient and family gained the important value of confidence through the caring of the home health nurse; with the nurse's commitment to caring, they gained faith in themselves, their ability to deal with new health-related situations as they arose, faith that they wouldn't be left alone, faith that they were known as persons valuable in their own right and worthy of care. This is the value of nursing, the reason nursing exists as a distinguishable social and human service. ”

“ Is it possible to truly care for someone if the nurse doesn't like him or her? In this light, another question arises: How can 1 enter the world of another who repulses me? Am I expected to pretend that this person (the patient) has not treated others inhumanely (if that is the case) ? Must I ignore the reality of the other's hatefulness toward me (if such exists) ? These are questions that come from the human heart. They express legitimate human issues that present themselves regularly in nursing situations. ”

“ In many settings where nurses find themselves practicing, there is little in the environment to support a commitment to ongoing development of a sense of self as caring person. In fact, many practice environments seem to support knowing self only as instrument, self as technology. When one perceives of one's "nursing self" as a depersonalized, disembodied tool, nursing tends to lose its flavor and the devoted commitment to nursing burns out. So how to sustain and actualize this fundamental commitment must be a point of serious study for the nurse who desires to practice nursing as caring. ”

“ Of course creating and sustaining environments that nurture and value the practice and study of nursing remains the challenge facing nurses caught in the maze of various organizational structures. Systems tend to perpetuate existing ways of being even though their members may repeatedly question the legitimacy of actions flowing from these structures. It is our belief that nursing can create a culture that values caring within systems and organizations. Systems and organizations can be reshaped and transformed through living out the assumptions and values inherent within nursing as caring. ”

“ As we have come to understand the concept of human science, our understanding of nursing has been enriched. Like most of our contemporaries in nursing, we were trained in the often-unarticulated assumptions of natural science. And we have traveled the road familiar to many nursing scholars, the road of expertise in objectification and quantification. Along that road, we began to notice the trivialization of cherished nursing ideas like presence, touch, relationship, knowing, and caring. ”

“ Through knowing self as caring person, I am able to be authentic to self and with others. I am able to see from the inside what others see from the outside. Feelings, attitudes, and actions lived in the moment are matched by an inner genuine awareness. The more I am open to knowing and appreciating self and trying to understand the world of other, the greater the awareness of our interconnectedness as caring persons. Knowing of self frees one to truly be with other. How does one come to know self as caring person? ”

“ No one person's role is more or less important than the other's. Each role is essential in contributing to the process of living grounded in caring. As each person authentically expresses their commitment in being there for and with the nursed, caring relationships are lived. When the focus in any health care institution fails to be the person cared-for, purpose, roles, and responsibilities become depersonalized and bureaucratic rather than person-centered and caring.
Personal knowing—knowing of self and other—is integral to the connectedness of persons in this dance. ”

“ One who cares is genuinely humble in being ready and willing to know more about self and others. Such humility involves the realization that learning is continuous and the recognition that each experience is unique. As my commitment to persons as caring moves into the future, I must choose again and again to ratify it or not. This commitment remains binding and choices are made based on devotion to this commitment. ”

“ In responding to the nursing call, the nurse brings an expert (expert in the sense of deliberately developed) knowledge of what it means to be human, to be caring, as a fully developed commitment to recognizing and nurturing caring in all situations. The nurse enters the other's world in order to know the person as caring. The nurse comes to know how caring is being lived in the moment, discovering unfolding possibilities for growing in caring. This knowing clarifies the nurse's understanding of the call and guides the nursing response. ”

“ At the heart of choosing new faculty is knowing their passion for and love of nursing. A focus of the interview process is discerning the person's devotion to the discipline. It is our belief that this attitude, this love of nursing, is the music for the dancers in the circle. One way to know if prospective faculty love nursing is to ask them to share a significant story from practice. Having faculty share a story illuminates their conceptualization of the discipline. ”

“ The nursing situation comes into being when the nurse actualizes a personal and professional commitment to the belief that all persons are caring. It should be recognized that a nurse can engage in many activities in an occupational role that are not necessarily expressions of nursing. When a nurse practices nursing thoughtfully, that nurse is guided by his or her conception of nursing. The concept of nursing formalized in the Nursing as Caring theory is at the very heart of nursing, extending back into the unrecorded beginnings of nursing and forward into the future. ”

“ Although we are well aware of an ongoing debate in nursing over technical versus philosophical connotations of theory, we characterize our work as a general theory of nursing developed in the context of our understanding of human science. While we are familiar with the formal concept of theory used in disciplines grouped in the physical and natural sciences, we believe that mathematical form is not an appropriate model for theory work in the discipline of nursing. ”

“ Here, valuing and respecting each person's beauty, worth, and uniqueness is lived as one seeks to understand fully the meaning of values, choices, and priority systems through which values are expressed. The inherent value that persons reflect and to which they respond is the wholeness of persons. The person is at all times whole. The idea of wholeness does not negate an appreciation of the complexity of being. However, from the perspective of the theory Nursing as Caring, to encounter person as less than whole involves a failure to encounter person. ”

“ Within the context of caring as process, Roach (1992, 1984) says that caring entails the human capacity to care, the calling forth of this ability in ourselves and others, the responsivity to something or someone that matters, and the actualizing of the power to care. Even though our human nature is to be caring, the full expression of this varies with the lived experience of being human. The process of bringing forth this capability can be nurtured through concern and respect for person as person. ”