The purpose of this study was to understand how patients experience their nurses, healing relation-ships. The 33 participants were patients who had been admitted to a general nursing unit of a university hospital in Seoul for more than one week, understood the study purpose and agreed take part, were fully conscious, able to communicate and over 20 years of age , their health was improving and they were ready for discharge. The data for this descriptive study using ground theory approach were collected by direct interviews with patients using five main questions derived from the literature and clinical experiences about their experiences of their nurses, healing relationships during hospitalization. Van Kaam’s method was used to analyse the data audio-recorded. Interpretation was enhanced consultations with two supervisors and one head nurse with a master’s degrees in nursing science, one nursing professor and one nursing docotoral candidate. Twenty - four patients said that they had formed a healing relationship with a nurse and nine said their relationship was not healing relationship. Six categories emerging from the characterizations of the healing relationships were valuable gratifying comforting trusting close and sympathetic. Descriptions of non - healing relationships were classified as none and poor. For this group of hospitalized patients nurses’ healing relationships were defined as valuable gratifying comforting trusting close as sym-Pathetic. Since the data suggest a change in the experiences during hospitalization, a gronded theory approach is recommended for further study.