Humanistic Nursing, page 49 by Josephine Paterson
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50
ned stage where precisely placed props lay ready to serve the actors and the passage of time is controlled by the chiming of a clock or the dimming of lights. As it is actually lived, the nursing dialogue is subjected to all the chaotic forces of real life. Nursing takes place in a real world of men and things in time and space. In many cases, it is a special world, a health system world, within the everyday world.
Other Human Beings
The dialogue lived between nurse and patient is affected by their numerous other interhuman relationships. For a nurse to be genuinely with a patient involves her coexperiencing his world with him. His family, friends, and significant others are a very real part of this world whether they are physically present or distant. So to be open to the patient is to be open to him as a person necessarily related to other men.
Furthermore, in caring for a patient the nurse relates to him not only as an individual patient but also as one in a group of patients. The group may be physically present (for example, in a ward, in an intensive care unit, in a {32} waiting room, in a dining room, in a therapeutic group) or they may be present in the nurse's mind (for example, while caring for one she may think "I have three more patients to visit," "so and so needs his medication in five minutes," "I promised so and so I'd get back to him," "three other patients are waiting to be fed"). Even when the nurse is responsible for only one patient, she often views him in relation to other patients she has nursed.
The nurse herself also functions within complex networks of interhuman relationships that affect the nursing dialogue. As health care becomes more specialized, more groups of health care workers arise and the various groups become more diversified. So the nurse's intersubjective transactions with her patients occur within an intra- and interdisciplinary milieu of constantly changing personnel, functions, and roles. While her own role is expanding, extending, deepening