Explicating Boundaries of Care Responsibility

Nursing care takes place within nurse–patient relationships that can be demanding, and these relationships can place significant destructive or onerous demands on nurses. In such cases, what can be termed boundaries of care responsibility need to be explicated. To do so, the chapter employs key notions on demands from phenomenological philosophy as analytical tools to explore empirical examples of nurses’ experiences, as provided in their everyday nursing practice. The examples illustrate that nurses confront demands from patients that manifest themselves as onerous, and they need to establish boundaries between demands. Following this, the chapter posits that explicating boundaries is assumed to be essential in caring relationships, as demands are not necessarily ethical but can be strongly connected to content where boundlessness is involved. When boundlessness is involved, destructive or onerous demands are placed on nurses. Sometimes they must decline care responsibility. It is therefore relevant to ask on what grounds they can decline responsibility as the situation raises difficult professional issues, including a question about nurses remaining in the profession.