Understanding care: Introductory remarks

Abstract

Care is among the most important concepts in healthcare. It is not only a descriptive concept, but it also conveys a normative orientation. Approaches to the ethics of care have shown that care can indeed be understood as an overarching normative concept that integrates different normative orientations. Nonetheless, determining what constitutes good care is usually a matter of finding reasonable compromises. In healthcare settings, a typical compromise involves finding a balance between optimal care for individuals on the one hand and the institutional demands of providing care to many care receivers over long periods of time as well as the limits of what can legitimately be asked of individual care providers on the other.