Articles: empathy.
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There is a belief in society that nursing is a profession and therefore that nurses are professional. There is also a belief that nurses care, that is, they care for their patients and consequently are a caring profession. ⋯ Where this is the case, can they still be considered individually a professional, and collectively a profession? Is there a connection between caring and profession? Can a nurse be one without the other? The assertion of this paper, is that to be a professional nurse, a nurse must care. "Caring" and "profession" are defined and the components for a model of a professional relationship proposed. Nurses are challenged to find ways in which to reclaim their professional status by recapturing their commitment to caring.
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Few studies have comprehensively focused on caring as perceived by the critical care family. This study explores and describes positive types of nurses' behaviors and critical care families' perceptions of these nursing behaviors as caring. Grounded theory methodology was used to enter the world of the critical care family and to elicit the meanings of caring behaviors in nurse-family interactions in the critical care waiting room.