Nurses' Perspectives of Encouraging Clients' Care-of-Self in a Short-Term Rehabilitation Unit Within a Long-Term Care Facility

This article presents a study conducted on a short-term rehabilitation unit in a long-term care facility. The purpose of the study was to explore, through qualitative methods, nurses' perspectives of encouraging clients to care for themselves. Although the literature suggested that encouraging self-care does not occur, the findings of this study showed that nurses have a broader view than what is currently known in nursing as "self-care." Potential impediments to nursing practice were overcome by the development of nurse-client relationships through which the nurses encouraged clients in what is described throughout this study as "care-of-self." Rehabilitation nurses play an important role in helping clients to integrate and reclaim the care of their emerging new selves. Care-of-self may be critical to clients not only in reaching their outcome goals for discharge but also in maintaining outcomes beyond discharge.