A Narrative Study of Nursing Art in Critical Care

Abstract

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.