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ABSTRACT
This article explores some of the latest developments of the emergence of Caring Science as the moral, theoretical, and philosophical foundation for nursing, leading to transformative personal/professional practices. Through nurse's taking responsibility for advancing nursing qua nursing, practitioners, patients, and systems alike are witnessing a revolution in nursing, which is restoring the heart of nursing and health care through theory-guided philosophical practices of heart-centered love and caring as the foundation for healing.
Philosophies, ethics, and theories of nursing science have continued to evolve over the past two or three decades. This has occurred largely in the academic world of nursing science, which often has disconnected nursing theory from nursing practices. However, during the past decade there has been special attention to theory-guided practice models and caring and healing relationships as the core of professional nursing. Concurrently, practitioners are seeking more authentic practices, giving meaning and purpose to their professional lives and work. Much of this changing consciousness has been triggered by the nursing shortage, nursing despair over system demands, as well as an awareness of a lack of human caring in our personal/professional lives, and in both systems and society.
Nurses are torn between the human caring values and the 'calling' that attracted them to the profession, and the technologically, high paced, task-oriented biomedical practices and institutional demands, heavy patient load, and outdated industrial practice patterns (Watson & Foster, 2003). It has been reported in some comprehensive summary research that nurses who are not able to practice caring can become hardened, brittle, worn down, and robot-like (Swanson, 1999).
Both practitioners and health systems now realize radical change from within is an essential and necessary requirement to reverse the non-caring trend many experience or witness in hospitals and health care today. In other words all the change approaches to date, attempt to solve the health care crisis in the USA and other Westernized countries by focusing on external issues and forces. These include such system solutions as economics, technology, management - organization, access control, and environmental hospitality models. Other proposed solutions focus on nursing recruitment and retention, better compensation packages, signing bonuses, relocation fees, and hiring increased numbers of minimally-educated laypersons or assistants. These tactics comprise superficial and short-term approaches, when what is needed...