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Individualization is considered a particularly important feature of nursing care by nurses, patients and their families, and by health care administrators. Descriptions in the literature suggest that individualized care requires some background knowledge of the patient, which nurses use to devise care plans that treat each patient as unique. However, few research-based descriptions of individualized care exist. The purpose of this article was to offer a definition of individualized nursing care synthesized from research findings. Descriptions of nursing care individualization emerged from two previously conducted grounded theory studies of nursing practice. Data relevant to the concept were retrieved from each study. These data were compared and contrasted in order to identify and describe individualized care from the perspectives of nurses and patients. The analysis resulted in a definition of individualized nursing care that makes explicit the characteristics of such care, thus providing a framework for designing and evaluating nursing care that recognizes patients as unique persons.

Knowing the patient is an important concept emerging from recent studies of nursing practice. The concept is relevant to therapeutic decision-making. Also, knowing the patient actualizes a cherished value in nursing: the treatment of persons as unique individuals. Investigators described that knowing the patient comprises two components: the nurse's understanding of the patient and the selection of individualized interventions. In addition, the nurse's experience with caring for patients, chronological time and a sense of closeness between the patient and nurse, are three factors consistently related to knowing the patient. The concept has implications for practice, including that knowing the patient may result in positive patient outcomes. Also, expert nurse decision-making may be characterized by knowing the patient. Recommendations for further research in this area include the clarification and refinement of the concept, as well as the examination of relationships between knowing the patient and outcomes of care.

The OPPQNCS holds promise for nurses who wish to monitor and improve the quality of patient-centered cancer nursing care and those who wish to investigate relations among care quality and healthcare system characteristics, patient characteristics, and nurse sensitive patient outcomes.