Comments on: “A comparative analysis of lay-caring and professional (nursing) caring relationships”

Abstract

It was with some trepidation that I took up the Editor-in-Chief’s invitation to write a commentary, 15 years on, on this much-cited past paper, [International Journal of Nursing Studies 24(2) (1987) 155–165]. I recalled the difficulty I remember having in ‘getting my head round’ Alison Kitson’s doctoral research work when I first heard her speak on it in the early 1980s. Even now I find the research literature on ‘caring’ to be generally difficult to read and digest. And so, approaching this task filled me with the kind of apprehension which students experience when faced with a tricky essay topic which, left to themselves, would not have been of their own choosing! A major part of my difficulty with the literature on this topic arises from confused and inconsistent use of the words ‘caring’ and ‘care’ and, in particular, with their detachment from the words ‘nurse’ and ‘nursing’. Even the title of Kitson’s article reminds me of this recurrent problem in its hyphenation of ‘lay-caring’ but not of its counterpart. Frequently, or so it seems to me, the words ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are used interchangeably, ignoring the proper part of speech in the usage of ‘care’, ‘caring’ or the verb, ‘to care’. This will seem pedantic, but look up the different parts of speech under ‘care’ in any dictionary; and while you are at it, also look up ‘nurse/nursing’. You will find, I think, that recourse to the straightforward lay definition of these terms is more instructive than some of the lengthy discussions that preface articles on ‘caring’ in the professional literature. My esteemed writing partner, Nancy Roper, contends that the words ‘care’ and ‘caring’, which crept into increasing use in the nursing literature in the 1970s, have succeeded only in displacing the words ‘nursing’ and ‘nurse’ from our professional vocabulary. We will lose our way, she contends, both in practice and in academe, if we insist on referring to ‘caring’ instead of ‘nursing’. I may simply have been brainwashed successfully by Nancy, but I now support her position wholeheartedly. The only time I now add ‘care’ to the word ‘nursing’ is when I want to distinguish nursing care from medical (or other) care. ‘Caring’ may be synonymous with ‘nursing’, or at least integral to it, but ‘caring’ is not the prerogative of the nursing profession. Try out the Roper regime of sticking to the word ‘nursing’. But enough of this general comment—albeit pertinent—and on to my commentary on Kitson’s paper, that being the specific task I was set. I have structured my comments to respond directly to the four questions that the Editor-in-Chief suggested might be asked in the course of a re-view of this IJNS paper.