Research on nurse-patient relationships: problems of theory, problems of practice

Research, theoretical and educational literature on interpersonal relations between nurses and patients has proliferated since the 1960s. This has generated a range of divergent accounts of what the nurse-patient relationship (NPR) ought to be; how this should be achieved; and how the NPR is constituted in practice. In this paper--through a selective review of the literature--the development of two contending perspectives on NPR and on nurse-patient interaction (NPI) characterized as technocratic and contextual, is discussed, and related to the increasingly problematic status of the relationship between nurses and patients in nursing theory and research.