Relationships Among Nursing Presence, Openness, and Fatigue in Acute Care Nurses

Nursing presence was first identified when Florence Nightingale established a physical nursing presence or "being" and providing compassionate care or "doing" in the military hospitals during the Crimean War (Watson, 1998; Boeck, 2014; Dossey, 2000). Nursing presence has been a central focus in nursing throughout the past several decades (Turpin, 2014) and has been positively linked to the development of nurse-patient relationships. Nursing presence has been hypothesized to transpire when a joint relationship develops between the patient and the nurse. The patient allows the nurse into a relationship in which the nurse recognizes the patient as a unique being and selects to intervene on the patient's behalf. The Model of Nursing Presence (Kostovich, 2012) depicts the ability of the nurse to be a "focused observer" and openness between both the nurse and the patient, are antecedents to nursing presence. However, conditions necessary for the nurse to be a focused observer and display openness may not be conducive. The purpose of this descriptive correlational study was to examine the extent to which fatigue and openness predict nursing presence in bedside nurses in inpatient acute care settings. The Model of Nursing Presence (Kostovich, 2012) guided this study.