Revisiting Basic Nursing Care

Abstract

What would fit in a nursing special issue of the Journal of Nursing Scholarship?After the call for manuscripts for this special issue, many nurse scientists asked for guidance on the suitability of their potential contributions. Most of their questions were on content, i.e., whether or not a certain topic would be considered within the scope of nursing care. Together, these questions illustrate a degree of uncertainty on the topic. So, what is and what can be considered within nursing care?General guidance can be found in landmark reports of the Institute of medicine (Institute of Medicine, 2001) and the World Health Organisation (WHO; 2006). Together, these reports underline that, regardless of medical conditions and context, health care should be client centred, safe, effective, efficient, accessible, timely and non-discriminative. Though not specific for any discipline, these traits of good quality health care are fully applicable to nursing care. Also they illustrate how basic can be used to refer to what is generic, regardless of context and health conditions.With a view to nursing, several authors tried to identify what is generic across populations and healthcare settings. The work of Virginia Henderson (1964) can be seen as a major contribution in this respect. Henderson identified the core of nursing care, as care focused on fourteen fundamental or human needs, being the need to breath normally, sleep and rest, eat and drink, eliminate body wastes, dress, maintain body temperature, keep clean, avoid dangers, communicate with others, worship, play, and learn. Of more recent date is the work of Kitson, Conroy, Wengstrom, Profetto-McGrath, and Robertson-Malt (2010), who describe the fundamentals of care as care for communication, breathing, eating and drinking, elimination, cleanliness and dressing, mobility, activities, rest, sleep, body temperature, working and playing, expressing sexuality, safety, and death care.These two largely overlapping overviews of the (care for) fundamental or human needs together indicate how nursing care serves human needs in the context of healthcare, yet not focusing on needs belonging to a specific health problem or care setting.Nonsimplistic Common GroundThough generic and nonspecialist, care should not be mistaken for simple care requiring low educational levels. The complexity of providing nursing care will vary with many individual and situational factors such as comorbidity, care dependency, social support, health care setting, and available resources.Following reports on harmfully poor, or even lacking, nursing care in UK hospitals (Francis, 2013; Keogh, 2013), it has been suggested that all nurses should spend a year of their initial training on providing nursing care. Though perhaps a welcome plea for reinvesting in care that serves fundamental needs, the discussions on this were partly condescending towards nursing care as well. Politicians asking nurses to step down to the level of care assistants and do the hands on work, implicitly also send out a message that care is the simple, dirty work that comes with the job.With this special issue, the Journal of Nursing Scholarship purposefully revisits nursing care. As nurses' common ground, informing and improving nursing care deserves our full attention and scholarly activities in this area deserve to be highlighted. …