Honoring Quality of Life

The notion of quality of life surfaces frequently throughout nursing curricula. Students are told to consider what others quality of life might be as they are performing tasks and dialoguing with persons who have sought help from healthcare personnel. Plummer and Molzahn (2009) completed a concept analysis of the meaning of quality of life as described by several nurse theorists and found most theorist have at least an implicit belief that health and quality of life are closely related. In addition, when searching online professional databases, the topic quality of life yields over 500,000 hits. So quality of life is, without a doubt an important, albeit misunderstood notion in the healthcare arena.

It is hoped most individuals in healthcare are interested in the quality of life of others who seek their help, yet the actual meaning of quality of life remains unclear to many. For example, is it realistic to believe that healthcare workers can look at a person living with lung cancer and determine the quality of life for that person without input from the person themselves? Not likely. Yet this is what often happens with physicians and nurses as they try to fix what they perceive to be broken, when in fact the person they are trying to fix, is content with where they are in the moment. According to Parse (2007) the only person who can determine quality of life for someone is “the individual living the life” (p. 217). Nurses and nursing students living the art of humanbecoming remember this fact and therefore keep human respect and freedom in the forefront of their being with others. Parse (2007) explained, “in light of quality of life, reverence is honoring without judging and respect is regard for personal choices” (p. 217).

Cody (2012) discussed using humanbecoming to guide his practice in writing, “I was called to nursing to bear witness to humanly lived experience. Not to practice medicine . . . but to bear witness, as a nurse, to the humanly lived experience of those receiving care” (p. 8). While it seems nursing students are required to learn most of what physicians learn, it remains important for them to be reminded of nursing as a profession unique and different from that of a physician. Nurses are not mini-physicians. Nurses guided by humanbecoming demonstrate this difference through true presence as others reveal-conceal value priorities in living personal quality of life. Nursing students can learn to be truly present with others receiving care and find guidance in their practice by learning about the humanbecoming concepts and principles. In the following article Dr. Mary Lou De Natale and Anne Klevay report nursing students’ coming to appreciate meaning, presence, and quality of life as they interact with others seeking care. This coming to understand how to practice the art of humanbecoming, as well as some of the humanbecoming concepts including quality of life, is discussed in light of the humanbecoming teaching-learning processes. It is important to note here that the authors do not discuss the humanbecoming theory as the belief system that undergirds true presence.