The current emphasis on intervention outcomes in health care research creates an imperative to move to new levels of caring models. Caring is postulated as the theoretical basis for specific nursing therapeutics for maintaining health, preventing illness, or confronting death. Documenting and understanding caring are essential to explain client outcomes from nursing practice and to predict client well-being and health. Caring is found to include physical care that is humane and emotional care that involves concern, involvement, sharing, culturally defined touching, voluntary presence, and humor. Meta-synthesis integrates, synthesizes, and organizes research results into coherent patterns that can be applied more easily to clinical practice. As clients have been closer to an acute illness experience, the focus is on nurse competence, lending confirmation to the importance of competence and cognitive knowledge in forming trusting relationships.