The Quality-Caring Model: blending dual paradigms

Abstract

Evidence supports associations between professional nursing and quality health outcomes. Yet, what specifically accounts for those linkages remains buried in the daily practice of nursing. The Quality-Caring Model exposes and demonstrates the value of nursing within the evidence-based practice milieu of modern health care. It favors a process, or way of being, that challenges modernist conventions and highlights the power of relationships. By reaffirming the nature of nursing's work as relationship-centered, the blended model describes the 2 dominant relationships that comprise professional encounters. Relationships characterized by caring are theorized to influence positive outcomes for patients/families, health care providers, and health care systems. Model components are clarified, assumptions described, and propositions stated. Conceptual-theoretical linkages in the model are identified and ties to empirical indicators provide the logical consistency necessary for validation. Clinical practice and research applications of the model are offered. The Quality-Caring Model helps to translate the hidden work of nursing into objective terms that can be tested. Scientifically demonstrating its worth will advance professional nursing while simultaneously improving the quality of health care.