The development of caring in the perioperative culture: nurse leaders' perspective on the struggle to retain sight of the patient.

This article focuses on Swedish nurse leaders and is aimed at achieving a more complete and differentiated understanding of what constitutes caring in the perioperative culture as well as their knowledge and responsibility for the development of caring. Interviews with open-ended questions were conducted with 10 nurse leaders, in which they described their experiences of developing perioperative caring. The interpretation process was based on Gadamer's philosophy of hermeneutics. The findings indicate that developing a perioperative caring culture is a struggle to retain sight of the patient, a process that includes the following 6 phases: (1) when the nurse leaders understood perioperative caring as a process, the nurse's and patient's shared world became obvious to them; (2) safeguarding the patient's position as a unique human being; (3) safeguarding the nurse's welfare by creating a compassionate atmosphere; (4) promoting an idea means never giving up; (5) attaching importance to being trustworthy; and (6) being involved in a dynamic interaction, comprising communion and reciprocity. The most important goal of nursing leadership is to safeguard the welfare of the suffering patient and the relationship between the nurse leader and nursing staff, based on the motive of caritas derived from the idea of humanistic caring.