Nursing at its Best: Competent and Caring

Abstract

An award-winning journalist spoke to a group of students during their first month in a baccalaureate nursing program, challenging the nursing profession to abandon its image of nurses as angels and promote an image of nurses as competent professionals who are both knowledgeable and caring. This presentation elicited an unanticipated level of emotion, primarily anger, on the part of the students. This unexpected reaction prompted faculty to explore the students’ motivations for entering the nursing profession and their perceptions of the relative importance of competence and caring in nursing. The authors begin this article by reviewing the literature related to motivations for selecting a profession and the contributions of competence and caring to nursing care. Next they describe their survey method and analysis and report their findings regarding student motivations and perceptions of competence and caring in nursing. Emerging themes for motivation reflected nursing values, especially altruism, and coincided with students’ beliefs of self-efficacy and goal attainment. Student responses indicated their understanding of the need for competence and revealed idealistic perceptions of caring. The authors conclude with a discussion of these themes and recommendations for student recruitment, curricular emphasis, and future research in this area.

A global comparison of nursing and midwifery's and medical efficacy in preventing COVID‐19 deaths 2019–2022

“…Constant bedside NMW care may be a more important intervention than first thought (Mokhtari et al., 2022). The relative importance of the NMW, to deliver person‐centred comprehensive healthcare to infectious patients, needs further elevation to more actively and accurately measure that impact (Rhodes et al., 2011; Ullman & Davidson, 2021).…”

The Factors Related to the Caring Behavior of Clinical Nursing Students

“…The ability to problems belongs to a new issue (Hawari, 2006). Rhodes stated that the intellectual level of a student relates to the challenge to his intellect in order for them to gain the knowledge, abilities and skills involved in nursing (Rhodes, M. K., Lazenby, R., & Moris, 2011).…”

“…They will also have the right to CB (Murphy, F. & Robert, 2009). Rhodes identified that the intellectual level of a student will challenge his intellect as a part of gaining their nursing knowledge and skills (Rhodes, M. K., Lazenby, R., & Moris, 2011).…”