Publisher's Synopsis
To talk about nurse caring and to support the idea that a good nursing coincides with caring, it is necessary to develop an argumentation process able to show how caring is a complex activity, that requires "thinking, emotions and competence". Nurses who care for patients provide, in their every day practice, ethically and meaningful actions that are able to convey a sincere concern about patients.
If the science of nursing corresponds to the science of caring, nursing research should explore the meaning of care to grasp what a good practice of nursing is.
This book reports the findings of a theoretical and empirical research on caring in nursing starting since 2007, based on 240 narratives on caring written down by nurses working in different care settings. The research question that guided the whole investigation process was the following: what does good caring in nursing consist of?
Gestures and thoughts of caring. A theory of caring from the voices of nurses is organised into five chapters. In the first two chapters we outline the general features of care in terms of eidos; this analysis may not meet reality in its tangible materiality, but eidos delineates, as its essential structure, a type of phenomena that concretely embodies care. Chapters three and four are dedicated to describe the empirical research process and the descriptive theory of a good practice of care mentioned by nurses involved in the research. Finally, in the last chapter we summarise the results of a literature's systematic review with the purpose of comparing the different methodological approaches to the study of caring and of comparing our research findings with those of previous studies on nurses' perceptions of caring.
