critical requisite to knowing as a process of nursing.
Establishing rapport, trust, confidence, commit-
ment, and the compassion to know others fully as
persons is integral to this crucial positioning.
Wholeness is the idealized condition or situa-
tion about the one who is nursed. This idealization
is held within the nurse’s understanding of persons
as complete human beings “in the moment.”
Expressions of this completeness vary from mo-
ment to moment. These expressions are human il-
lustrations of living and growing. Oftentimes, using
technology alone and focusing on the received
technological data rather than on continually
“knowing” the other fully as person, provides the
nurse the understanding of persons as objects who
need to be completed and made whole again.
Paradoxically, because of the idea that human be-
ings are unpredictable, it is not entirely possible for
the nurse to fully know another human being—ex-
cept in the moment and only if the person allows
the nurse to know him or her by entering into his
or her world.
In this perspective, the condition in which the
nurse and the other allow each other to know each
The condition in which the nurse and the
nursed allow each one to know each other
exists as the nursing situation, the shared
lived experience.other exists as the nursing situation, the shared
lived experience between the nurse and nursed
(Boykin and Schoenhofer, 2001). In this relation-
ship, trust is established that the nurse will know
the other fully as person; the trust that the nurse
will not judge the person or categorize the person
as just another human being or experience, but
rather as a unique person who has hopes, dreams,
and aspirations that are uniquely his or her own.
It is the nurse’s responsibility to know the per-
son’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Technological
competency as caring allows for this understand-
ing. In doing so, the nurse also sanctions the other
(the nursed) to know him or her as person. The ex-
pectation is that the nurse is to use multiple ways of
knowing competently in the fullness of possibilities
in using technologies in order to know the other
fully as person. The nurse’s responsibility is im-
measurable in creating conditions that demand
technological competency and care, much like the
wish to create a computerized human facsimile. In
creating a nursing situation of care, there is a requi-
site competency to know persons fully, to under-
stand, and to appreciate the important nuances of
the person’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
There are many ways of interpreting the concept
of “person as whole.” Three of the popular inter-
pretations are derivations of the concept of person
from dominant perspectives, those views that shape
the popular understanding of the concept. Some of
these interpretations delineating the exclusivity of
disciplinary constructs influencing nursing care
practices include the mind-body dualism popularly
ascribed to Descartes, which supplies the continu-
ing citation of the connection between mind and
body. At least in nursing, the mind-body-spirit con-
nection is popularized by Jean Watson in her the-
ory of transpersonal caring. The simultaneity
paradigm categorized the human-environment
mutual connection as the relationship that best
serves human science nursing perspective and
grounds theoretical frameworks and models of
practice, including those of the caring sciences.
These contemporary and popular elucidations cre-
ate conceptions of human beings as the focus of
nursing and of knowing persons in their wholeness
as the practice of nursing.
The process of nursing is a dynamic unfolding
of situations encompassing knowledgeable prac-
tices. The meaning of the process is characterized
by listening, knowing, being with, enabling, and
maintaining belief (Swanson, 1991). The following
occurrences exemplify the process:- Knowing and appreciating uniqueness of
persons - Designing participation in caring
- Implementation and evaluation (a simultane-
ous illustration and exercise of conjoining rela-
tionships crucial to knowing persons by using
nursing technologies) - Verifying knowledge of person through contin-
uous knowing
In this model of practice, knowing is the pri-
mary process. “Knowing nursing means knowing in
the realms of personal, ethical, empirical, and aes-
thetic—all at once” (Boykin and Schoenhofer, 2001,
p. 6). The continuous, circular process demon-
strates the ever-changing, dynamic, cyclical nature
of knowing in nursing. Knowledge about the per-
son that is derived from assessing, intervening,
CHAPTER 24 Technological Competency as Caring and the Practice of Knowing Persons as Whole 383