Nursing is a professional service offered in social contexts, most often in bureaucratically organized health services. Discussions of health services, overheard in boardrooms and legislative chambers, are languaged in impersonal, aggregate, disembodying, and perhaps more importantly, economic terms. In contrast to the accepted ritualization of such language, nursing has a very important role to play--to bring the human, the personal dimension to health policy planning, and health care delivery systems. Clearly, it is nursing knowledge itself, of human person, of person as caring, that has been missing. While other groups rightly bring in knowledge of efficient operation and financing, nursing's contribution to the dialogue on effective care has the potential to remind all players of the real bottom line, the person being cared for. We must remember that in most industrialized countries health service is viewed as a commodity delivery system, an economic exchange of goods and services. While this is not the only context for nursing, it is the most prevalent context. If nurses choose to participate in existing delivery systems, and most do, then ways must be created that preserve the service of nursing while responding to the appropriate requirements of the system. Ultimately, this would require of nurses that they become skilled in articulating their service as nursing, and connecting that service to the recording and billing systems in use. Although this same goal animated the nursing diagnosis movement of the 1970s, within the terms of that movement, the result was less than fortunate: nursing's effort to emulate the fee-for-service billing practices of medicine failed, and nursing contributions were neither communicated nor reimbursed. When nurses tell the stories of their nursing situations, however, the service of nursing becomes recognizable. The unique contribution that nurses make, expressed in the focus of nursing, emerges across settings. The difference between a nursing story and a typical nursing case report is striking; the first conveys the nursing care given, the second reports the medical-assisting activities performed by the nurse. We have discovered in our work with nurses that while nursing care is usually given, it is frequently neither acknowledged nor communicated. The nurse practicing within the caring context described here will most often be interfacing with the health care system in two ways: first, to communicate nursing in ways that can be understood; and second, to articulate nursing service as a unique contribution within the system in such a way that the system itself grows to support nursing.