ABSTRACT
The comparison revealed two dimensions of nursing care: the biological and the psychospiritual. Biological nursing care refers to the maintenance of activities of daily living such as personal hygiene and mobility, and to the implementation of nursing treatments. Nurses' beliefs about their responsive and unresponsive patients' needs also affected the type of support given during the dying process. In the care of terminally ill patients, biological care was usually combined with psychospiritual care, just as it was with acutely ill patients. A nurse's busyness, which reduces the amount of time she has to spend on patient care, may be affected by several variables. The constantly changing dynamics of the unit also helped determine nurses’ interactive behaviors. Because factors such as nurses’ values, philosophies, and the degree of busyness on the unit affected nursing care, it is apparent that a generalization about the focus of nursing care for hospice patients on Four South cannot be universally valid.
