ABSTRACT
Asked to describe the goals of nursing care in general terms, many nurses would volunteer, or at least agree with the suggestion, that they work to promote the quality of life of their patients and clients. They would probably use the term ‘quality of life’ in the same rather general sense in which it is commonly used in everyday life by professionals and lay people alike. This common meaning is difficult to define crisply and clearly, but it has a rather positive feel to it and carries overtones of ‘helping people to achieve their potential’, ‘doing what is best’ for them, ‘promoting their well-being’. This would lead one to suppose that nurses possess practical and research-based knowledge about circumstances and strategies in and through which patients’ quality of life can be enhanced, and in fact, the nursing literature contains a good deal of information of this kind. However, very little of this literature is specifically concerned with the meaning of quality of life. Furthermore, it tends not to employ the concept explicitly either as a source of ideas or as a’gold standard’ against which to compare extant practice.
