NURS 492 Week 5 Caring: The Art of Nursing Example

Caring as the Art of Nursing: My Definitions of Nursing, Person, Health and Environment

Introduction

After thirteen years at the bedside, I have used the words nursing, patient, health and caring thousands of times without stopping to say what I mean by them. Nursing theories define them, and I learned those definitions for exams, but this capstone asks a harder question: what do I believe they mean, after all I have seen? This paper gives my definitions of the four central concepts of nursing, then of caring as an art, and explains how my Christian faith shapes the way I care. Each definition begins with a patient from my progressive care unit, because that is where my beliefs were formed.

Nursing

Mr. H. was admitted with heart failure for the fourth time in a year. The medical plan was the same each time: diuretics, fluid limits and a daily weight. What changed on his fifth admission was that a nurse sat down with him and his wife and asked how they managed at home, discovered that he weighed himself only when he felt swollen and taught them together, at the kitchen-table level, what a three-pound gain meant. He did not come back for five months. Nothing in the medical plan had changed; what changed was that a nurse noticed how the plan met his actual life and adjusted the teaching to fit it.

I define nursing as the skilled, knowledgeable and caring work of helping people protect, recover or make peace with their health, through attention to their bodies, minds, relationships and circumstances. Nursing is both science and art. Its knowledge is real and measurable, as studies of nurse staffing and education show, but its effect depends on how that knowledge is delivered to one person at a time. The same teaching about daily weights can fail with one patient and succeed with another, depending on whether the nurse has understood the person in front of her.

Person

Mrs. R. was ninety-one, deaf and recovering from a fall, and the night staff referred to her as "the hip in 12." To her family, she was a retired teacher who had taught half the town to read. I define a person as a whole human being, body, mind and spirit, created with dignity that does not depend on age, ability or diagnosis, and shaped by relationships, history and culture. A patient is a person who has entrusted part of their care to us for a time.

Chang and Jeong (2026), in a meta-ethnography of 17 qualitative studies of nurses' views on dignified death, identified themes of a death that embraces humanity, preserves personal identity, allows connection and reconciliation and affirms acceptance and spiritual serenity. Those themes describe dignity as something nurses protect by seeing the whole person, which supports my definition: a person is never reduced to a room number or a diagnosis.

Health

Mr. D. had an ejection fraction of 20% and would never be cured, yet he told me he felt healthier than he had in years because he had reconciled with his son and was walking to the mailbox again. I define health as a state of well-being and wholeness in body, mind, spirit and relationships that a person can experience in degrees, even when disease is present. Health, as I understand it, reaches past freedom from disease to include the ability to live meaningfully within limits.

This definition has a social side. The most recent report on the future of nursing describes how health is shaped by social determinants such as income, housing, education and access to care, and calls on nurses to address those conditions (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). A patient's health includes whether he can afford his medicines and get to his appointments. Mr. D. could walk to his mailbox because his son drove him to cardiac rehabilitation twice a week; without that ride, his health would have looked very different.

Environment

I define environment as everything surrounding a person that affects their health: the physical setting, relationships and community, social and economic conditions and the culture of the place where care is given. On our unit, environment includes the noise of alarms at night, the family members who can or cannot visit and the staffing that determines whether a nurse has time to talk. It also includes the home each patient returns to: the stairs a heart failure patient must climb, the grocery store two bus rides away and the neighbor who checks in or does not. A nurse who plans discharge without asking about that environment is planning for a patient who does not exist, and the readmission that follows is often blamed on the patient rather than on the plan. Ulrich et al. (2022) reported a national survey of 9,335 nurses showing that healthier work environments are related to nurses' job satisfaction and their intent to stay. A nurse's environment becomes part of the patient's environment, because exhausted nurses have less to give. When I care for five unstable patients, the quiet conversation that might have helped one of them often does not happen, and the patient's environment loses something no monitor measures.

Caring as an Art

I define caring as the art of noticing what a particular person needs and responding with knowledge, skill and genuine concern, in a way that helps them feel seen and safe. It is an art because no protocol can tell me exactly when to sit down, when to hold a hand or when to be quiet; those decisions come from attention and practice, the way an artist's judgment does.

Research supports the idea that this art has real effects. Franchi et al. (2025) reviewed studies of caring contact, an intentional physical and emotional connection between nurse and patient, and found reductions in pain, anxiety and stress, along with greater comfort, relaxation and satisfaction with nursing care. Babaei et al. (2022), interviewing nurses, patients and families on cardiac wards, found that compassionate care centered on patient-focused emotional communication, expressed through verbal and nonverbal language, empathy, organizing care around the patient and respecting culture. They also noted that managers shape compassion through staffing and support, which reminds me that the art of caring needs conditions in which it can be practiced. Like any art, it is also learned. I learned when to be quiet with a grieving family by watching an older nurse do it, and I now try to show new graduates the same thing, because caring skills pass from nurse to nurse more through example than through lectures. Caring is an art because it has to be fitted, each time, to a person no textbook has met.

How the Christian Faith Affects Caring

My faith changes caring in three ways. First, it tells me who the patient is. Doornbos et al. (2005) describe a Christian vision of nursing in which every person bears God's image and health belongs to the flourishing God intends for His creation. If every patient bears God's image, then the confused man who curses at me and the gentle woman who thanks me deserve the same respect. Jesus taught that service given to the least of His people is service given to Him (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Matthew 25:40).

Second, my faith gives caring a motive that does not depend on feelings. On nights when I am tired and short-staffed, compassion does not always arise on its own. Paul reminds believers that love is patient and kind, describing love by what it does rather than how it feels (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Corinthians 13:4), which I read as a description of action I can choose even when I do not feel it.

Third, faith opens room for spiritual care. Mascio et al. (2022), reviewing 42 studies with 4,712 nurses, found that nurses provide spiritual care less often than patients want, and that skills, professional identity and the work environment all influence whether they do. My faith gives me confidence to ask a patient what gives them strength or whether they would like a chaplain, while respecting beliefs different from mine. Last winter a frightened man facing cardiac surgery asked me to pray with him, and the few minutes we spent did more to calm him than the medication he had been given.

Conclusion

My definitions can be gathered into a short philosophy. Nursing is skilled, knowledgeable and caring work with people whose health is at stake. Each person carries a dignity that illness cannot remove. Health is wholeness that can exist alongside disease. The environment, including the conditions nurses work in, shapes health for better or worse. Caring is the art that joins knowledge to presence. My faith tells me why that art matters: every patient is someone God made and loves, and caring for them is part of my calling.

References

Babaei, S., Taleghani, F., & Farzi, S. (2022). Components of compassionate care in nurses working in the cardiac wards: A descriptive qualitative study. Journal of Caring Sciences, 11(4), 239-245. https://doi.org/10.34172/jcs.2022.24

Chang, S. O., & Jeong, E. (2026). Sustaining dignity at life's end: A meta-ethnographic study of nurses' insights. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 82(4), 2827-2845. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.17080

Doornbos, M. M., Groenhout, R. E., & Hotz, K. G. (2005). Transforming care: A Christian vision of nursing practice. Eerdmans.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Franchi, V., Fiorini, J., De Luca, E., & Sili, A. (2025). Caring contact in nurse-patient relationship and its impact on healthcare outcomes: A mixed-method systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 39(4), e70142. https://doi.org/10.1111/scs.70142

Mascio, R., Best, M., Lynch, S., Phillips, J., & Jones, K. (2022). Factors influencing nurse spiritual care practices at the end of life: A systematic review. Palliative & Supportive Care, 20(6), 878-896. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951521001851

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). The future of nursing 2020-2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25982

Ulrich, B., Cassidy, L., Barden, C., Varn-Davis, N., & Delgado, S. A. (2022). National nurse work environments, October 2021: A status report. Critical Care Nurse, 42(5), 58-70. https://doi.org/10.4037/ccn2022798