Take two dedicated, efficient doctor/ managers out of the mix at a deep rural district hospital and the local health care system begins to implode, leaving a nursing manager scrambling to re-assign remaining staff while the local population is left with the prospect of little more than a mediocre day hospital. The story of the 180-bed Madwaleni Hospital in the Mbashe sub-district (with a popula...

The aim of this empirically grounded philosophical paper is to explore the notion of holistic care with the intention to expand it into a notion of ecological care and in such a way revisit the original ideas of caring science. The philosophical analysis, driven by lifeworld theory and especially Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, is firmly rooted in contemporary clinical care. We used interview data ...

In a previous issue of this journal, John Fien (2003) argued for an environmental education that broadens its theoretical framework beyond sociological and educational theory “to draw on the humanities, the arts, philosophy and ethics to learn how to care for, and yes, love, each other and the Earth” (p. 2). In developing his position, Fien referred to the writings of philosopher Nel Noddings (...

Caring has long been recognized as central to nursing and is increasingly posited as a core concept although developing a theoretical description of caring which is adequate in the 21st. century continues to be a difficult task for nursing scholars. Consequently, verifying existing theoretical structures of caring remains an ongoing challenge. The aim of this article is to provide empirical ver...

PURPOSE This ethnography is aimed at describing the care-giving practices of the nuclear family and relatives of the elderly within a clan village in relation to their socio-cultural context. Four basic notions of the study came from Leininger's culture care theory and the nurse-client negotiation model of Anderson. In order to understand the cultural system of caring, the following questions w...

OBJECTIVE This article links two dimensions of occupational therapy within the context of professionalism: the role of caring and the implications of occupational therapy being a predominantly female profession. METHOD Seven occupational therapists representing various levels of professional experience were interviewed to determine (a) how female occupational therapists perceive caring and (b...