Globally, healthcare has become dominated by women nurses. Gender is also known to impact the way people are cared for in various healthcare systems. Considering gender from the perspective of how lived bodies are positioned through the structural relations of institutions and processes, this systematic review aims to explore the meaning of gender in the caring relationship between the nurse and the older person through a synthesis of available empirical data published from 1993 to 2022. CINAHL, PUBMED, EMBASE and Web (...) of Science were searched from the beginning of each database's temporal range, and PRISMA guidelines were used for the screening, reviewing and selection processes of available records. A thematic synthesis of the available data resulted in three analytical themes: (i) vulnerability of the gendered body, (ii) norms and values related to gender and sexuality and (iii) balancing closeness and distance in the nurse‐patient relationship. These themes are intertwined and represent different aspects of gender meaning in the nurse–patient relationship. This research shows that gender, through its influence on the gendered body, its relationship with power dynamics in the caring process, and its intersection with dimensions of identity, has a significant meaning for the experienced vulnerability in the nurse–patient relationship. This has implications for the well‐being and sense of dignity of the older person as well as the nurse. (shrink)

Understanding people's experience of skin ageing as it is lived can enable sensitive approaches to promoting healthy skin and to care in general. By understanding the insider perspective, what it is like for individuals, a way to sensitise practice for more humanly sensitive care is offered. Through interviews with seventeen community‐dwelling older people, the essential meaning of living within ageing skin was illuminated as a state of managed inevitability. The skin is inevitably changing, and ageing skin is a marker of (...) change over time but the person within remains. Constituents of the phenomenon comprise the experience of unfamiliar sights and sensations given by ageing skin; facing and accepting bodily changes and seeing this back and forth in family connections; taking care of the skin “to face” the world; and to present oneself to others and a different place in the world, same person, changed body. Findings point to why and how nurses can treat older people as persons by not over emphasising a view on ageing bodies or bodies with aged skin alone, but in tempering this view with deeper existential insights, meeting the older person with a skin care need as a person and not just as a physical entity. (shrink)

There is limited consensus about what constitutes humanly sensitive care, or how it can be sustained in care settings. A new humanised care assessment tool may point to caring practices that are up to the task of meeting persons as humans within busy healthcare environments. This paper describes qualitative development of a tool that is conceptually sensitive to human dimensions of care informed by a life‐world philosophical orientation. Items were generated to reflect eight theoretical dimensions that constitute what makes care (...) feel humanly focused. An action research group process in 2014–2015 with researchers, service users, healthcare professionals in two diverse clinical settings (stroke rehabilitation and dermatology) was used. Feedback on conceptual content, transparency of meaning and readability was then gained from a panel in Sweden and third‐year student nurses in the UK. The tool can be applied to attune staff to human dimensions of care, offering items which point to concrete examples of humanising and dehumanising features of practice in ways that have not yet been fully captured in the caring literature. Based on theoretically led experiential items, with dedicated focus on what makes people feel more, or less than human, it may offer improvement on available assessments of care. (shrink)