"FUNCTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE" OF THE NURSE ROLE: AN EVALUATION.

The article discusses the role of nurses in treating a patient. Researchers postulated that the pattern of expectations constituting the nursing role is characterized by disinterest, functional specificity, affective neutrality, universalism, and performance-oriented achievement. The therapeutic process requires as a condition of its effectiveness that the patient's functionally diffuse needs for response and sup port be met in part. To this extent the patient must be treated as a person. Thus nurses should treat patients as cases, except when it is therapeutically necessary to treat them as persons. Since patients are often demanding, unreasonable, irritating, suffer and die, the nurse, to keep from collapsing under the strain, should not be allowed to become emotionally attached to her patients. In recent years, the concept of "comprehensive medicine" has mushroomed. Today the idea that a patient is more than just an organism, that he is an individual acting and interacting in a social context that his loves, hates, likes, dislikes, understandings, misunderstandings, and fears, affect not only his attitudes toward medical care, but also his motivation to stay well, his very desire to live or die is commonly known if not totally accepted. The fact that many schools of nursing now include courses in psychology and sociology is testimony to the influence of this concept of medical care upon the training of nurses.