The significance of examining caring among nurse managers corresponds directly with balancing quality of work life. Day to day demands requires nurse mangers to: staff the department (shift by shift); promote quality of care at the bedside; stay in budget; and have direct oversight of frontline staff. This middle management role is demanding with little support is provided by nursing leadership. Because of the imbalance of quality of work life, nurse managers are considered a vulnerable population. The reality is job longevity is non-existent for most due to undue pressures. Nurse Administrators can turn that paradigm around and must have an understanding of the concept of human caring to support nurse managers to be successful in their role.
Purpose
The purpose is to analyze the concept of human caring personally and professionally from the slant of the nurse manager. It is important to uncover and critically evaluate perceptions of human caring among this vulnerable population to gain insight in order to have senior nursing leadership can proceed to provide support to this at risk group.
Method
Rodgers (2000) Evolutionary Method of Concept Analysis was selected to further explore the dynamic concept of human caring. This method utilizes 7 activities: identification of the concept of interest; choosing the setting and sample; collecting and managing the data; analyzing data; identification of an exemplar; interpreting the results; and identify implications.
Results
The literature on caring is prolific. References were non-existent on human caring and nurse managers. References found were mostly older than 10 or more years. A concept map examined four distinguishing features: antecedents, consequences, socio-cultural, and temporal variation. A dichotomy exists between each of the distinguishing features examining contrary viewpoints that could affect how the nurse manager functions at work and home based on each individual circumstance.
Conclusions
The Evolutionary Method provided a formal structure to investigate the concept of human caring by creating a strong foundation for evaluation. The concept map demonstrates a visual depiction to gain insight. This process stimulates new thinking on divergent perspectives to aid nursing administrators to support nurse managers’ quality of work life and promote retention in the role.