**Background:** Body care—defined as assistance with washing, bathing, grooming, dressing, toileting, and personal hygiene—is a cornerstone of nursing and eldercare, particularly for older people experiencing functional decline. In Scandinavian countries, body care has undergone significant transformations due to new public management reforms emphasizing efficiency, standardization, and task orientation, creating tensions with nursing ideals of dignified, person-centered care. The nursing profession has historically struggled with the ambivalent status of body work, which is simultaneously essential and devalued due to its association with contaminated substances and deteriorating bodies. Recent international evidence has documented recurrent failures in fundamental care, including patients left in soiled bedclothes or not bathed for days, prompting renewed attention to fundamentals of care. This review aimed to systematically map international nursing research on body care of older people and critically analyze underlying assumptions using a problematization approach.
**Methods:** A systematic mapping review methodology was employed following Gough et al.'s framework, combined with Alvesson and Sandberg's problematization perspective. Searches were conducted in Cinahl, PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, and Scopus using a block search strategy covering the phenomena (body care, showering, bathing, toileting, personal hygiene, etc.), population (older people 65+), and context (institutional settings). Inclusion criteria were: peer-reviewed nursing research published January 2010–October 2020 in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, or English, focusing on body care of older people or care workers assisting them. Of 4179 papers identified, 1607 duplicates were removed, and after title/abstract and full-text screening, 34 papers were included. Data extraction captured journal, geographical context, study design, focus, theoretical approach, body part studied, setting, and participant characteristics. No quality assessment was performed, consistent with systematic mapping methodology.
**Key Results:** The 34 included papers were published in 20 journals (14 nursing journals, 6 medical science journals), predominantly from Western contexts (United States, Canada, Sweden). Most papers (n=27) were empirical: 18 quantitative (10 with randomized designs), 9 qualitative, and 3 mixed methods. Ten papers focused on effectiveness of strategies or products (bathing methods, skincare regimes, incontinence products), nine on experiences of older people, care workers, or relatives, and one on institutional factors. Twenty papers focused on specific body parts (oral cavity or skin), while nine addressed whole-body care. Twenty-two papers were set in nursing homes or long-term care facilities, seven in hospitals, and four in home care. Fifteen papers focused on care-dependent older people characterized by various screening tools (age, sex, BMI, functional status, cognitive impairment, skin observation scales). The theoretical approach was predominantly biomedical, with only three papers using phenomenological or hermeneutic approaches. Four papers referenced nursing theorists (Nightingale, Henderson) or person-centered frameworks (Kitson, McCormack). The problematization analysis identified four dominant assumptions: (1) Body care as evidence-based practice—32 of 34 papers implicitly accepted evidence-based knowledge as the gold standard, primarily through quantitative intervention studies measuring effectiveness; (2) Body care as relational ethical practice—12 papers assumed body care requires a therapeutic relationship grounded in dignity, autonomy, and person-centeredness, citing Nordic philosophy and nursing frameworks; (3) The body as both body-object and body-subject—most papers implicitly conceptualized the body through Cartesian dualism, either as a passive biomedical object divided into parts (skin, mouth, perineal area) or as an experiencing subject, with only one study explicitly using Merleau-Ponty's lived body concept; (4) Objects in body care as nonrelational materialities—papers treating materials (incontinence pads, washing cloths, barrier creams) as stable, fixed entities with inherent properties, measured through physiological characteristics or costs, without exploring how objects actively constitute care practices.
**Clinical Implications:** The review reveals significant gaps between nursing research and the complexities of actual body care practice. The dominance of biomedical, evidence-based approaches means that mundane, everyday aspects of body care—such as transferring a person from bed to toilet, combing hair, or arranging linen—are largely absent from research because they resist isolation and control required for evidence generation. The fragmentation of the body into separate parts (skin, mouth, perineum) in research mirrors problematic task-orientation in clinical practice, potentially reinforcing the devaluation and delegation of body care to less-trained staff. The absence of older people's own perspectives contradicts the person-centered care values many papers espouse. The review suggests that current research paradigms may inadvertently perpetuate the low status of body care work and fail to capture how material objects, organizational demands, and social contexts shape care practices. The authors call for research designs and theoretical perspectives that can address the multiple social and material realities of professional body care, moving beyond both biomedical reductionism and purely relational understandings to embrace sociomaterial approaches that recognize how people, objects, and practices together constitute care.