Another factor experienced in their meeting is the amount of choice or
control either nurse or patient had over their coming together. In
today's complex health care systems, a nurse may be assigned to care for
a particular patient, or for persons in an area or unit, or may be
called into service through a registry, {25} or may be approached
directly by a patient. From the other side, the patient also experiences
varying degrees of control over his meetings with nurses depending on
the system in which the health care is offered, his location, his
financial means, and so forth. So when a patient and nurse do meet in a
given instance, each comes to the situation bearing remnants of feeling
of having caused or not having caused this encounter with this
particular individual. (Of course, even in the most de-individualized
systems the nurse and/or patient can still control their meetings to
some extent, for example, avoidance by the nurse being too busy or
avoidance by the patient feigning sleep.)
The patient and the nurse are two unique individuals meeting for a
purpose. In the existential sense, each of these persons is his choice,
each is his history. Each comes to meet the other with all that he is
and all that he is not at this moment in this place. Each comes as a
particular incarnate being. Each is a specific being in a specific body
through which he affects the other and the world and through which he is
affected by them. This nurse who uses her eyes, ears, nose, hands, her
body, this way here and now meets this patient whose body in this
condition serves him this way here and now.
Furthermore, both the patient and the nurse have the human capacity for
disclosing or enclosing themselves. So they have some control over the
quality of their meeting by choosing how and how much to be open with
and to be open to the other. Their openness is influenced by their views
of the purpose of the meeting. In general, the patient expects to
receive help and the nurse expects to give it. However, their views may
differ on the precise need and the kind of help to be given.
Also, although the nurse and the patient have the same goal, that is,
well-being and more-being, they have different modes of being in the
shared situation. One's purpose is to nurture; the other's is to be
nurtured. This difference in the perspectives from which they approach
the meeting is reflected in the kind and degree of their openness to
each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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