Narratives of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Nurses: Experience with End-of-Life Care

Abstract

The purpose of this interpretive narrative research is to explore the experiences of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nurses with end-of-life care of infants and their families. Guided by Newman's Research-as-Praxis, we met with nurse participants from a tertiary care NICU twice in small groups and once on the telephone to share their stories. Patterns of relationship were discerned and shared with our participants for their affirmation, challenge, and elaboration. NICU nurses' end-of-life experiences include relationship patterns, knowledge construction, and tensions of temporal and spatial proximity of suffering and death. Arts-based forms of dissemination of our findings have been developed to invite readers into reconstruction of their experiences and to demonstrate the transferability of the method.