Background: Touching exists in different forms and can be experienced through the skin. By touching oxytocin is released like a relaxing hormone which counteracts anxiety and depression. Therapeutic contact and healing touch are methods nurses’ uses to give positive feeling of serenity, warmth and wellbeing for the patients. Touching can be a method for communication and happiness when word is not enough. By touching can nurses notice if a patient is, for example, anxious. The hands of the nurse are important caring of the patient such as adequate touching calms and sooths anxiety and pain.

Aim:  To describe the significance to give touch in nursing.

Method: A literary summary of scientific articles published between 1995 until 2012, where seven of them have qualitative approach and three have quantitative and all of them found via the databases CINAHL and MEDLINE.

Result: Nurses were describing how touching had positive significance for the patients. The nurses could by touching reduce the patient’s pain, anxiety and worries. Different sorts of touching was mentioned like massage. A general theme was touching by non-verbal communication which gave a sense of security to the patients. The nurses’ attitude to touch became a problem since the nurses only touched the patients when necessary, for example when caring by hygiene without respecting the patients’ integrity.

Discussion: In the result discussion it was described how the limited knowledge by the nurses of touching. By training (and education) they could carry though touching with help of different types of touching, massage, tactile touching, therapeutic touch etc. It relieved the state of pain, anxiety, and it also created security, closeness, better sleep and well-being of the patient. The touch adapted to the patients’ needs was described as positive and meaningful. To build an interpersonal relationship was essential and fundamental before the nurse approached the patient.