Contributor – Mariana Lori Jurist, BSN, RN
PhD Student, FAU College of Nursing

Caring, to me, is not an approach. It’s the reason I became a nurse, and the reason I stay one.

I have learned that if I am not careful, the word caring can get treated like a soft add-on, something nice that sits behind what is considered “real” work. But caring IS the real work. It isn’t what I add to nursing; it’s what nursing is. It’s our identity. It’s the moral center that gives our tasks their meaning. My science, my skills, my assessments, my interventions … none of them become nursing unless they ultimately serve caring.

That is why I feel protective of the word. Not because I want nursing to be sentimental, but because caring is disciplined, rigorous, and deeply ethical. Caring is what keeps people from being reduced to diagnoses, numbers, or task lists, especially in settings where technology, urgency, and documentation can quietly take over. Boykin and Schoenhofer’s Nursing as Caring gives language to something I have always known in my core: persons are caring by virtue of being human, and nursing is our commitment to nurture persons living caring. That idea doesn’t romanticize nursing; it anchors it. It reminds me that when I walk into a room, I’m not entering a case…I’m entering a life.

What I have come to understand is that caring in nursing is different from caring in a general sense. Many professions care about people. Nursing cares for persons as the work itself. That difference matters. Caring-about can stay at the level of good intentions. Caring-for is concrete, relational, responsive, and accountable. It expands to our patients actually experiencing being cared for, not just completing a task “ordered” by the doctor. Was the patient met as a person? This question has changed how I understand quality. Quality is not only accuracy and efficiency; quality includes the felt experience of being seen, safe, and respected in the midst of vulnerability.

In my practice, caring becomes clear at the exact moments it would be easiest to become strictly technical. When the alarms are loud, the stakes are high, and my mind wants to narrow down to what is controllable … numbers, protocols, steps … caring is what pulls me back to the person. Sometimes narrowing is part of competence; it keeps people alive. But caring is what keeps me from disappearing into the technicality of healthcare. It reminds me to look again. At the face, the fear, the family story, the meaning under the symptoms, the question behind the question. It reminds me that my presence is not a luxury. It is part of the care.

Caring also helps me live with what I cannot fix. Nursing is full of limits. We do everything “right,” and outcomes still break hearts. In those moments, caring becomes fidelity: staying with the person and the family, refusing to abandon them to the clinical reality of their suffering, being faithful and loyal. And caring is never abstract. It is always situated in a real world shaped by time, staffing, culture, policy, and power. I’ve felt that pull: the pressure to document more than I connect, to move faster than I can be present, to let the system define what matters. Caring becomes my quiet resistance to that pull. Caring helps me remember that efficiency can never be the highest value when a human being is vulnerable.

So, what do I think caring is?

Caring is skilled, ethical, relational nursing that protects personhood. It is science in the service of dignity. It is competence shaped by conscience. It is the refusal to reduce a person to a problem. It is presence that does not rush past meaning. It is advocacy when the person’s voice is quiet or dismissed. It is tenderness without loss of rigor. It is rigor without loss of humanity.

If I had to say it simply, caring is nursing’s promise. The promise that the person will not be alone in what is happening to them. Sometimes that promise looks quiet … how I enter the room, how I listen, how I explain, how I pause. And, sometimes, it looks fierce … protecting, speaking up, insisting on dignity. Other times, it looks like steady companionship in the face of uncertainty. But it is always the thing that makes nursing nursing.

I don’t want caring replaced or watered down because, for me, caring is not a word we use to sound compassionate. It is the name of our discipline’s center. If nursing loses caring language, we don’t just lose a term. We lose the story of who we are, how far we’ve come, and who we are called to be.

Reference

Boykin, A., & Schoenhofer, S. O. (2001). Nursing as caring: A model for transforming practice. Jones & Bartlett.

About Mariana Lori Jurist

I am a NICU nurse and a PhD Nursing student at Florida Atlantic University. My scholarship and practice are grounded in caring science and Boykin & Schoenhofer’s Theory of Nursing as Caring, with a particular focus on how nurses and parents can co-create comfort for NICU infants at the bedside. My perspective is shaped by lived experience in high-acuity neonatal care, where technology is essential, yet never sufficient, because the infant and family are always more than physiologic data

My positionality is that of a clinician-scholar who works within the structures and constraints of contemporary NICU care while intentionally advocating for relational, family-centered practices that protect personhood. I write from the standpoint that parents are caring persons by virtue of their humanness and should be recognized as essential partners in their infant’s care, not as visitors. This belief shapes the message of my post: nursing’s distinctive contribution is not only what we do, but how we nurture persons living caring in moments of vulnerability, uncertainty, and hope.