Nurses are responsible for knowing and respecting whole individuals within their lives, lifestyles, cultures, beliefs, hopes, and expectations of care. We must work in the arena of human relationships and draw our knowledge from sciences, arts, religions, and many disciplines. We apply this awareness daily to help each person on a unique path toward health. Nurses have been multiskilled and multitasking professionals since long before such terms were coined. Nursing is a performing art, a contact sport, a life's calling, and a cascade of deeply spiritual human ewards.
Many people live their entire lives without many kinds of care.
Virtually no one goes through life without some kind of nursing care. Nurses share the entire range of critical human experiences, from birth to death, with other people who have no other relationship with us than the nurse-person relationship. We understand such experiences because we live through them with so many people in the course of our practices. We see and share these experiences from a vantage, and in a depth and breadth that no other profession can. Nursing is an integrated, living practice, that requires an individual to carry all of the qualities, skills, and experiences mentioned here, and more, through each moment.