Responding to Francis: nursing practice

Hemingway A (2013) What is nursing care and who owns it? Nursing Times; 109: 6, 16-17. The Francis report into the failings at Mid Staffordshire, out last week, demands practical responses from all health professions if they are not to be repeated in other NHS providers. This article explores why nurses need to re-examine their philosophy of care and move beyond the notion of patient-centred care to develop a compassionate, humanising approach. What is the role of the nurse? For many of us, the point of nursing is to care for others. This may seem a simple objective but, for nursing in the UK, there is tension between how we define caring and how to maintain this as a primary focus in an increasingly business focused, target-driven organisation like the NHS. I would argue the profession needs to go further than a focus on caring: we need to consider what the point of our practice is – what is the goal, what are we striving to achieve for each person we care for? We need to develop a greater focus on the promotion of wellbeing through seeing illness as a life experience and recognise that this goes beyond the priorities of our organisations or profession and requires us to have the patient experience as our primary consideration. Caring for wellbeing What do we mean by wellbeing as a focus for care? Galvin and Todres (2012) offer a