Holistic comfort: operationalizing the construct as a nurse-sensitive outcome

The structural and semantic complexities of the construct of comfort are explicated and a rationale is presented for operationalizing the construct for holistic nursing practice and research. A review of the literature about comfort provides theoretical support for the concept's taxonomic structure, which was presented in an earlier publication and is modified in the present article. In addition to being useful for generating assessment tools for practice, the taxonomic structure of comfort can be utilized to develop instruments for outcome research.