HUMANISTIC NURSING: ITS MEANING

Nursing is an experience lived between human beings. Each nursing situation reciprocally evokes and affects the expression and manifestations of these human beings' capacity for and condition of existence. In a nurse this implies a responsibility for the condition of herself or being. The term "humanistic nursing" was selected thoughtfully to designate this theoretical pursuit to reaffirm and floodlight this responsible characteristic as fundamentally inherent to all artful-scientific nursing. Humanistic nursing embraces more than a benevolent technically competent subject-object one-way relationship guided by a nurse in behalf of another. Rather it dictates that nursing is a responsible searching, transactional relationship whose meaningfulness demands conceptualization founded on a nurse's existential awareness of self and of the other. {4}