Leininger And Mayeroff's Philosophy Of Caring In Nursing

This course challenged me to visually portray or draw what caring in nursing means to me. My initial drawing of caring focused on physical interventions such as assessing and reassessing the patient. I knew that caring was crucial and that it consisted of more than just nursing interventions, but I was still having difficulty in defining “caring” and depicted it as being solely beneficial to patients.

My original picture included the word, “acceptance.” Acceptance is a part of caring and is described in Leininger’s Transcultural Nursing Theory. Leininger understood that each person is a unique individual and that their differences should be appreciated in order to build a nurse/patient relationship based off of mutual trust and respect (Bailey, 2009). Her theory advocated for providing not only culturally competent care, but also patient-centered care (McCance, McKenna, & Boore, 1999).

Milton Mayeroff’s Philosophy of Caring explains caring as providing growth for both the patient and the nurse. However, Mayeroff’s idea of growth could also be applied to an idea or be philosophical in nature (Bailey, 2009). Like Mayeroff, Boykin and Schoenhofer also knew that caring could be mutually beneficial for both the nurse and the patient. They believed that the best way to achieve caring in nursing was to utilize a holistic approach that centered on the individual as a whole (Bailey, 2009). They wished to veer away from science and medicine’s focus on the individual as being composed of organ systems (Schoenhofer,