Abstract
Overview: Strengths-based nursing (SBN) is an approach to care in which eight core values guide nursing action, thereby promoting empowerment, self-efficacy, and hope. In caring for patients and families, the nurse focuses on their inner and outer strengths-that is, on what patients and families do that best helps them deal with problems and minimize deficits. Across all levels of care, from the primary care of healthy patients to the critical care of patients who are unconscious, SBN reaffirms nursing's goals of promoting health, facilitating healing, and alleviating suffering by creating environments that work with and bolster patients' capacities for health and innate mechanisms of healing. In doing so, SBN complements medical care, provides a language that communicates nursing's contribution to patient and family health and healing, and empowers the patient and family to gain greater control over their health and healing.