Students and teachers connected self-awareness with actively
using oneself to nurse, in order to make a positive difference to clients
and families. This involved using and expressing oneself in order to
care for people and seemed to value a humanistic way of nursing.
This echoed Paterson and Zderad's (1988) influential work on
approaching nursing from an existentialist perspective, as a living
human act, where nursing is not only focused on the ‘doing’ but on
what happens between nurse and client: