Toward a theory of professional nursing caring: a unifying perspective.

This paradigm of professional nursing caring unifies aspects of humanistic and scientific perspectives. Through interconnections of the holistic nursing perspective, person-environment interactions, and the caring ethic, fusion occurs that reorganizes old orders and structures. From this dynamic, creative energies are generated and used in being, relating, and acting by the nurse through therapeutic use of self. Through professional nursing caring, the wholeness and integrity of a patient-client is maintained and assisted toward actualization, with wellness and illness outcomes altered, and more caring health-related environments restructured that preserve and support the humanness of patients and people in those environments. The professional nursing paradigm has been guided in organization by a holographic perspective of reality, a perspective that envisions two realms: the implicate and the explicate, with the implicate available to the explicate realm in dealing with reality. The two realities have been unified into a holonomic order in which the essences (qualities) and entities (actions) of professional nursing caring have been restructured into a new order. The paradigm opens avenues for constructing a nursing theory in which caring is systematically embedded in concepts, structure, and relations. The imperative for nursing education is to reconceptualize professional nursing caring and undertake the effort and energy required to place this essence in the heart of nursing theory, practice, education, and research. This is the profession's challenge for the coming decade.