Nursing care management concepts: scoping review

OBJECTIVES: to clarify the concepts of Nursing Care Management and Nursing Care Administration in the scientific literature, highlighting approximations and distances between the terms. METHODS: scoping review as per Joanna Briggs Institute protocol and preferred reporting items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). The searches were performed in LILACS, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Scopus databases. RESULTS: the qualitative analysis, through content analysis, counted 49 studies published between 2007 and 2020. Hospital care was the most evident level of care. It was identified that nursing care management aims at the macropolitical performance of nurses and mobilizes skills essentially strategic-cognitive, while Nursing Care Administration aims at the micropolitical performance of nurses, requiring essentially strategic-administrative skills. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: the study allowed us to propose the conceptualization of the terms and identify the approximations and distances between them.