VISION

The International Association for Human Caring members recognize caring is an interdisciplinary collaborative partnership for the well-being of humankind and appreciate multiple philosophical dimensions of caring:

• Caring is the human mode of being.
• Caring is holistic attending to body, mind, and spirit.
• Caring is the spirit of caritas—faith, hope and love that is the basis for all human communion and action.
• Caring through love connects and transforms everything in the universe.
• Caring is culturally diverse and universal and addresses both individual needs and our shared humanity.
• Caring is transcultural, the ethical relationship of love, compassion and response to suffering and need, within the dynamics of cultures, such as professional caring situations, organizations, communities, and societies.

The International Association for Human Caring members also recognize that while caring is not unique to nursing, caring is lived uniquely in nursing:

• Caring is a complex unitary relational science that illuminates the nurse-person relationship and mutual human-environment patterning.
• Caring in nursing is action and competencies, which aim toward the good and welfare of the others.
• Caring is the essence of nursing and the moral imperative which guides nursing praxis (education, practice and research).
• Caring in nursing is a special way of being, knowing and doing with the goal of protection, enhancement and preservation of human dignity.
  

GOALS

The goals of the IAHC are to:

1. Identify major philosophical, metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, personal, sociocultural, and professional dimensions of care and caring, including caring theories, to advance the body of knowledge that constitutes nursing and other caring professions.
2. Promote the educational preparation of caring professionals to develop interprofessional caring practice models and collaborative partnerships.
3.  Use caring knowledge to transform organizational systems, communities, and societies.
4. Illuminate the nature, science, and scope of evidence-informed caring research and its relationship to caring professions.
5. Identify the major components, processes and patterns of caring from a global perspective within the United Nations Sustainable Development  goals.
6. Support the facilitation of caring knowledge in diverse, global bureaucratic practice settings to humanize complex systems to provide human caring for health, healing, wellbeing, and the dying process.
7. Stimulate the worldwide, systematic investigation of caring by caring scholars and share findings with colleagues at an annual research conference.
8. Disseminate caring knowledge through refereed publications and public forums.
9. Maintain an organization with elected officers and members for the purpose of sustaining a network of caring scholars.