ABSTRACT
Are care and compassion the essence and the central, unifying, and dominant domain that characterizes nursing? Is nursing the art and science of human caring and compassion, and a core value to the profession of nursing? In the chapter on Care and Compassion in Nursing, Sigridur Halldorsdottir ponders on these important questions. She analyses care and compassion as constructs and the traditional values of these for nursing and proposes that care and compassion are the material for bridge-building between a nurse and a patient. Moreover, that care and compassion are an acknowledgement of our humanhood, and that it is indeed the basis of our existence. Furthermore, she analyses the powerful effects of positive emotions like care and compassion and gives some actual examples of what former patients have told her when she interviewed them. She briefly summarizes the discourse on care and compassion in the nursing literature as well as what it is like to be a patient in the health care system and to receive care and compassion, or not. Finally, she claims that care and compassion, or uncaring, are perhaps an oversimplification, and that there are indeed more shades to these human phenomena, perhaps not 50 but at least five.
