Background: Nursing has come a long way since the days of Florence Nightingale and even though no consensus exists it would seem reasonable to assume that caring still remains the inner core, the essence of nursing. In the light of the societal, contextual and political changes that have taken place during the 21st century, it is important to explore whether these might have influenced the essence of nursing. The aim of this study was to describe registered nurses' conceptions of caring.
Methods: A qualitative design with a phenomenographic approach was used. The interviews with twenty-one nurses took place between March and May 2013 and the transcripts were analysed inspired by Marton and Booth's description of phenomenography.
Results: The analysis mirrored four qualitatively different ways of understanding caring from the nurses' perspective: caring as person-centredness, caring as safeguarding the patient's best interests, caring as nursing interventions and caring as contextually intertwined.
Conclusion: The most comprehensive feature of the nurses' collective understanding of caring was their recognition and acknowledgment of the person behind the patient, i.e. person-centredness. However, caring was described as being part of an intricate interplay in the care context, which has impacted on all the described conceptions of caring. Greater emphasis on the care context, i.e. the environment in which caring takes place, are warranted as this could mitigate the possibility that essential care is left unaddressed, thus contributing to better quality of care and safer patient care.
Keywords: Caring; Conceptions; Interviews; Nursing; Person-centredness; Phenomenography; Qualitative research; Registered nurses.