Nurses' stories: the search for a relational ethic of care

The author begins by telling "Mike's story," a personal narrative account of an interaction with a patient. "Mike's story" provides a lens through which the author explores an alternative paradigm for nursing ethics--a paradigm grounded in a relational ethic of care. Mike's case is used to demonstrate how the moral experience of the nurse is distorted by the standard of moral rationality in traditional biomedical ethics. An interpretive analysis of "Mike's story" attempts to capture some of the fundamental assumptions of a relational ethic of care. The author identifies the benefits of grounding a theory of nursing ethics in nurses' conflicting stories of caregiving and encourages nurses to claim those stories that reflect the moral foundation of nursing.