Nursing as Compassionate Competence: A Theory on Professional Nursing Care Based on the Patient’s Perspective

Abstract

This paper introduces a theory, synthesized from studies about professional nursing care from the perspective of patients’ perceptions of caring and uncaring encounters with nurses and other health professionals. The theory’s major tenets are: Nursing is compassionate competence and caring is the core of nursing according to the patient. the other aspects are: Competence, which must always have primacy in nursing according to the patient; wisdom, postulated to develop through the interplay of the nurse’s knowledge and experience; attentiveness, evidenced by a nurse’s undivided attention to the patient while with the patient; empowering communication and connection between nurse and patient, key to good nursing care according to the patient; and self-knowledge and self-development of the nurse, without which it is unlikely that the nurse can keep on being caring and empowering in communication with clients of nursing.