A narrative study of nursing art in critical care.
The purpose of this study was to describe nursing art from the perspective of patients who had been nursed in a critical care unit. The study pursued two objectives: (a) to generate stories of occasions in which nursing was considered art in a critical care setting and (b) to describe the meanings made manifest in those stories. Using a narrative inquiry, 10 persons were interviewed twice for the purpose of answering the research question. Stories were generated in open-ended interviews, tape recorded, and analyzed by the primary researcher using Van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological framework. Five themes were found to represent critically ill persons' experience of nursing art: (a) perpetual presence, (b) knowing the other, (c) intimacy and agony, (d) deep detail, and (e) honoring the body. The stories cultivated a human face and contextual detail for the abstract holistic concept of nursing art.
Adult and Child Nursing Department, College of Nursing, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA, USA.
Kathryn L
KL
Gramling
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D002983:Clinical Competence; D003422:Critical Care / Q000379:methods*; D016638:Critical Illness; D004993:Ethics, Nursing; D005260:Female; D018939:Holistic Nursing / Q000941:ethics*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D024802:Nurse's Role; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States