Visualizing and realizing caring in practice through guided reflection.

Guided reflection provides a challenging and supportive milieu for practitioners to learn through reflection towards achieving desirable work. This work inevitably demands confrontation with self and the conditions of practice that limit the achievement of desirable work. It also demands an understanding of what is desirable nursing. From an ideological position, desirable work is generally defined in terms of humanistic caring. The paper discusses how caring can be visualized and realized in practice through the experiences practitioners reflect on and share within guided reflection. This work is illustrated using using guided reflection dialogue.