Primary nursing is a delivery system designed: to allocate 24-hour responsibility for each patient's care to one individual nurse; and to assign this nurse the actual provision of her patient's physical care whenever possible. The primary nurse leaves information and instructions for her patient's care when she is off duty, so the nurse who relieves her knows about the patient as a person and exactly how care should be administered in this particular case. The primary nurse also has a major responsibility for preparing the patient and his family for discharge. Primary nursing is a system for delivering nursing care in an inpatient facility.