Managers must support nurses to boost their commitment to care.

You only need to ask most nurses why they wanted to join the profession and stories will flow about “being a patient in awe of the nurses”, or of visiting someone in hospital and the impact this had. These are the ways in which most of us realised our desire to care and thus embarked on our lifelong NHS careers.
This desire to care needs to be nurtured in order to be sustained throughout a working lifetime, especially alongside the dynamics of a shifting work-life balance. One case study in which a trust defined a set of values to improve staff engagement produced the following five core values: putting patients first; respecting others; striving to be the best; taking pride in what we do; and acting with integrity (NHS Employers, 2008). However, this list is not an exhaustive representation of issues, merely a platform for discussion.