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.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Kathryn Louise Gramling (2004) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 4 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: