Nurse caring is well-established as the foundation of nursing practice. However, methods for documenting nurse caring have not been well-identified. Many charting systems currently in use, paper or electronic, provide no standardized format for documentation of nurse caring behaviors. This pilot study indicated that nurses prefer a fill-in-theblank documentation format for nurse caring behaviors rather than a narrative format. This study also demonstrated the impact of the act of documenting caring behaviors on increasing awareness of caring and the nurse’s pride in caring.

With the perspective of Disability Creation Process (DCP), rehabilitation caring extends the definition of patient safety beyond physical aspects. Given that rehabilitation transforms the person holistically and solicits a humanistic approach from the caregiver, it seems inevitable that psychological, social, and spiritual standpoints must be considered as major issues for these patients. By presenting the DCP with new research findings, pertaining to a caring approach in rehabilitation, a strongly linked perspective was revealed, which contributes to patient safety.

Nurses are often faced with the challenge of reconciling what is seen and believed regarding life with what is popular and commonly known by biomedical science. Faced with this philosophical, ethical, and moral dilemma, nurses can use many of the philosophical viewpoints grounding nursing science and its practice to assist in the reconciliation to this life-death issue. Using various perspectives and reflecting on Boykin and Schoenhofer’s theory of nursing as caring, this article addresses the question whether the presence of a beating heart is a sufficient determining factor to declare that a person is “alive,” influencing the reconciliation of technologic, caring, and nursing perspectives on health and human care. In essence, “Is a beating heart tantamount to being alive?”

The nursing as caring theory asserts that knowing emerges from within the nursing situation and that knowledge can be transformed for nursing purposes into nursing science, which evolves from nurturing persons living caring and growing in caring. The purpose of this paper is to describe research-as-praxis methodology, as it was applied to the nursing as caring theory in a recent study, as an effective way to simultaneously engage in research, practice, and theory application. Because caring is a central exemplar of nursing, it is appropriate to consider the usefulness of this research-as-praxis methodology to examine questions that emerge from within any nursing situation, and it is cogent to suggest that this research methodology would be applicable and appropriate for generating nursing knowledge using the broad expanse of nursing theoretical perspectives.

The words nurse or nursing as related to the profession of nursing today tend to be associated with the words care and caring. Care and caring have been discussed and researched by scholars from different disciplines. This paper provides an overview of care and caring from the historical, ethical, and theoretical viewpoints of scholars in the field, such as Reverby, Gilligan, Noddings, Watson, and Munhall, that form the foundation for a clinical case discussion. The role of the advanced practice registered nurse in teaching care and caring is discussed and future research opportunities explored.