Concepciones de profesionales del cuidado sobre humanización y expectativas ante Humanitude®

Objective: To describe care professionals’ conceptions of humanization and the expectations attributed to Humanitude® before training. Materials and methods: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted with 11 professionals from two residential care facilities for older people in Portugal, selected through criterion-based purposive sampling. Before training, participants completed a written questionnaire containing five open-ended questions. The corpus of 55 responses was examined using inductive qualitative content analysis and a manual audit matrix. Results: The analysis identified four main categories: recognizing the person before the task; the relationship as a space for humanization; the tension between the intention to care and the obstacles to sustaining humanization; and Humanitude as a resource for translating values into concrete practices. Participants associated humanization with dignity, respect, autonomy, empathy, and recognition of individual uniqueness, while also identifying difficulties related to workload pressure, limited time, the mechanization of care actions, and relational complexity. They expressed expectations of acquiring practical tools to translate humanistic values into everyday care. Conclusions: The findings reveal a gap between recognizing the principles of humanized care and sustaining their application in practice. Participants anticipated Humanitude as a potentially useful approach for narrowing this gap without replacing the ethical foundations of care.