Negotiating Self-Care in Rehabilitation Nursing

The authors conducted a study to examine nurse and patient perceptions of self-care and the performance of self-care in rehabilitation settings. The grounded-theory method was used to conduct and analyze in-depth interviews of 12 nurses and 12 rehabilitation patients. Every nurse and every patient had expectations regarding who would control each aspect of the patient's self-care. When these expectations were noncongruent, negotiation usually occurred. Successful negotiation resulted in a balance of self-care, the optimal balance between nurse and patient control.