Summary•This paper explores the concept of caring when used to define the nature of nursing.•It is suggested that explorations of caring in nursing fail to acknowledge the real world of work in nursing, which is influenced by personal career choice and the organization of the health‐care systems in which nurses work.•In some situations nurses delegate the caring role to others thus giving ‘care by proxy’, a factor that is not clearly acknowledged in the literature on caring.•It is suggested that if caring in nursing practice was denned as ‘formalized caring’ it would offer a framework for the analysis of caring more conducive to the reality of nursi