Caring Narratives and the Strategy of Presence: Narrative Communication in Nursing Practice and Research

Abstract

Professional nursing care is formed and carried out in a social cultural process. The discipline of nursing should study narrative communication to understand how individual and collective levels are connected in experiences of sickness and cure. Narrative as transformative acts of caring and the narrative structure of preverbal acts and contexts of care are waiting for further research and are naturally connected to the art of nursing. Personal presence, listening, and engagement are important to ethnographic research with a focus on narrative as well as to first-rate nursing care.