English language. Indeed, the word is commonly used as much in talking about our everyday lives and relationships as it is in the marketplace. At the same time, nurses thinking about, doing, and describing nursing know that caring has unique and particular meaning to them. Caring is one of the first synonyms for nursing offered by nursing students and is surely the most frequent word used by the public in talking about nursing. Caring is an essential value in the personal and professional lives of nurses. The formal recognition of caring in nursing as an area of study and as a necessary guide for the various avenues of nursing practice, however, is relatively new. Anne Boykin and Savina Schoenhofer have received many requests from academic peers and students to articulate the nursing theory they have been working to develop. This book is a response to the call for a theory of nursing as caring. The progression of nursing theory development often has been led by nurse theorists who stepped into other disciplines for ways to think about and study nursing and for structures and concepts to describe nursing practice. The opportunity to use language and methods of familiar, relatively established bodies of knowledge that could be communicated and widely understood took shape as many nursing scholars received graduate education in disciplines outside of nursing. Conceptions and methods of knowledge development often came then from disciplines in the biological and social sciences and were brought into ways of thinking about and doing nursing scholarship. Evolution of new worldviews opened the way for nurses to develop theories reflecting ideas of energy fields, wholeness, processes, and patterns. Working from outside the discipline of nursing, along with shifts in worldviews, has been essential to opening the way for nurses to explore nursing as a unique practice and body of knowledge from inside the discipline, and to know nursing in unprecedented ways. Nursing as Caring: A Model for Transforming Practice sets forth a different order of nursing theory. This nursing theory is personal, not abstract. In order to express nursing as caring there is a clear need to know self as caring person. The focus of the Nursing as Caring theory, then, is not toward an end product such as health or wellness. It is about a unique way of living caring in the world. It is about nurses and nursed living life and nurturing growing humanly through participation in life together.

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