The meaningful encounter: patient and next-of-kin stories about their experience of meaningful encounters in health-care
- Författare
- Gustafsson LK, Snellma I, Gustafsson C.
- Titel
- The meaningful encounter: patient and next-of-kin stories about their experience of meaningful encounters in health-care
- Utgivningsår
- 2013
- Tidskrift
- Nurs Inq
- Volym
- 20
- Häfte
- 4
- Sidor
- 363-71
- Sammanfattning
This study focuses on the meaningful encounters of patients and next of kin, as
seen from their perspective. Identifying the attributes within meaningful
encounters is important for increased understanding of caring and to expand and
develop earlier formulated knowledge about caring relationships. Caring theory
about the caring relationship provided a point of departure to illuminate the
meaningful encounter in healthcare contexts. A qualitative explorative design
with a hermeneutic narrative approach was used to analyze and interpret written
narratives. The phases of the analysis were naïve interpretation, structure
analysis on two different levels (narrative structure, and deep structure through
metaphors) and finally a dialectic interpretation. The narratives revealed the
meaning of the meaningful encounter as sharing, a nourishing fellowship, common
responsibility and coming together, experienced as safety and warmth, that gives,
by extension, life-changing moments, a healing force and dissipated insight. The
meaningful encounter can be seen as a complex phenomenon with various attributes.
Understanding the meaningful encounter will enable nurses to plan and provide
professional care, based on caring science, focusing on patient and next-of-kin
experiences.