The above paper reports on a study that interviewed 17 care providers about their caring experiences on a hospital psychiatric ward, and attempted to illicit the meaning of this work. The study used Ricoeur's (1976) phenomenological hermeneutic method, and induced three themes which illuminated the meaning of care provided. These were described as: being in the midst of human storage, moving towards a human care of relations, and struggling with the ‘old and the new’. The authors then interpreted and discussed these findings in the light of a previously published interview study (Pejlert et al, 1995), which obtained the experiences of the patients who lived on a long-term psychiatric ward. The authors conclude that attending to ingrained attitudes of the past and their influence on the new approaches to care is essential to understand changes in ways of doing nursing tasks and ways of relating to clients.