This work aims at describing and analyzing the concept of fundamental nursing, with the purpose to clarify the constitutive elements that can be applied to understand and expand this termination. In spite of being created in the 1970s at the Anna Nery School of Nursing, this concept was adopted by other Schools of Nursing in the country to designate a teaching program or a department. The author states in favor of this termination as a theoretical abstraction that is maintained in the practice dimension as an essential component of nursing understood in its totality. The author affirms that what is fundamental is not only the basic, but general, including professional actions of providing care to people and human groups. Fundamental is the character of "uniqueness" that transcends nursing in its totality, independently of the several categorizations, sectors and sceneries of professional action. It also represents the consolidation of nurses meeting with their clients in health or disease situations. The personal view is applied to elucidate predicatives and implications regarding the use of this concept in teaching and research.
nursing; fundamental nursing; concept attributes