Learning how to provide nursing care that reflects the highest standards must be the aspiration of all nursing students. Being able to demonstrate that you have the knowledge and skills to deliver care of a uniformly high standard is an essential requirement of both the professional statutory organization (the Nursing and Midwifery Council, NMC) and your programme provider. Naturally, the level of expectation will differ according to your stage in your pre-registration programme. Nevertheless, your readiness to progress from the common foundation programme to your branch programme will be assessed as to your ability to deliver professional nursing care, and that you have the underlying knowledge to do so. This section focuses on some of the core attributes and knowledge that you require to deliver such care.

Frameworks for describing high-quality care have been developed by different professional and government organizations within the UK. One of these was a ‘toolkit’ for benchmarking the fundamentals of care (Department of Health 2001). The intention of developing a toolkit was so that health and social care personnel would use the benchmarking document to address issues of concern within their areas of work in order to improve services already provided as well as to monitor existing practices. The Department of Health (2003) noted that: ‘the benchmarks are relevant to all health and social care settings…and can be used in primary, secondary and tertiary’ care settings.

They are applicable to all patient/client/carer groups. What is of primary concern is that all health care practitioners engaged in benchmarking, including patients and carers, where involved, should agree the indicators that demonstrate best practice within their area of care. The importance of getting these fundamental aspects of care right is essential if patient/client/carer care is to improve. Getting the fundamentals right was reinforced in ‘The NHS plan’ (Department of Health 2000) to improve the patient experience. It is so important that, since the introduction of ‘The NHS plan’ and the ‘Essence of care’ (Department of Health, 2001 and Department of Health, 2003), many health care organizations have begun special programmes designed to ensure staff have the necessary skills and knowledge to guarantee high standards of care.

The ‘Essence of care’ toolkit (Department of Health, 2001 and Department of Health, 2003) is one strategy introduced throughout England to provide health care practi tioners with a framework to take a patient-focused structured approach to sharing and comparing practice. It enables health care practitioners to identify best practice and to develop action plans that can improve care. We have used this framework as a structure for this second section of the book. The benchmarks that were developed by the Department of Health (2001) covered eight essential areas of patient care:

Since then, other benchmark standards have been added; for example, in 2003, a benchmark relating to communication between patients, carers and health care professionals was added.

In the three chapters of this section, we explore issues associated with the art and science of nursing. Within each chapter we provide examples of how the art of nursing and caring is manifest within the applied science of nursing. This is evident in the way in which care is delivered and the way in which practitioners communicate with their patients, their carers and with other health care professionals. Hand-in-hand with the idea of nursing being an art is the importance of nursing being a science. We will be exploring the science of nursing within the context of food and nutrition, personal and oral hygiene as well as in communication skills. These chapters provide the theoretical underpinnings that are so important for effective, professional nursing care delivery. In the narrative that follows, you will be introduced to the sources of knowledge that may be used to inform practice, caring relationships and caring behaviours.