Background: Compassion is seen as a core professional value in nursing and as essential in the effort of relieving suffering and promoting well-being in palliative care patients. Despite the advances in modern healthcare systems, there is a growing clinical and scientific concern that the value of compassion in palliative care is being less emphasised. Objective: This study aimed to explore nurses’ experiences of compassion when caring for palliative patients in home nursing care. Design and participants: A secondary qualitative analysis inspired (...) by hermeneutic circling was performed on narrative interviews with 10 registered nurses recruited from municipal home nursing care facilities in Mid-Norway. Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data Services granted permission for the study (No. 34299) and the re-use of the data. Findings: The compassionate experience was illuminated by one overarching theme: valuing caring interactions as positive, negative or neutral, which entailed three themes: (1) perceiving the patient’s plea, (2) interpreting feelings and (3) reasoning about accountability and action, with subsequent subthemes. Discussion: In contrast to most studies on compassion, our results highlight that a lack of compassion entails experiences of both negative and neutral content. Conclusion: The phenomenon of neutral caring interactions and lack of compassion demands further explorations from both a patient – and a nurse perspective. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to illuminate the meaning of receiving help from home nursing care for the chronically ill, elderly persons living in their homes. The study was carried out in Norway. Data were collected by narrative interviews and analysed by phenomenological hermeneutic interpretations. Receiving help from home nursing care sometimes meant ‘Being ill and dependent on help’. Other times it meant ‘Being at the mercy of help’. It could also mean ‘Feeling inferior as a human being’. Sometimes (...) help was given by nurses who were respectful and proficient at caring for an elderly person, while at other times nurses seemed to be incompetent and worked with a paternalistic attitude without respect for privacy. Receiving help also meant elderly persons wanted to be regarded and approached as equal human beings, supported in the courage to meet challenges in life. (shrink)

One important aspect of the nurse-patient relationship is nurses’ attitudes towards their patients. Nurses’ attitudes towards people with dementia have been studied from a wide range of approaches, but few authors have focused on the structure of these attitudes. This study aimed to identify a structure in licensed practical nurses’ attitudes towards people with dementia. Twenty-one group dwelling units for people with dementia at 11 nursing homes participated in the study. A total of 1 577 assessments of 178 patients were (...) sent out to 181 respondents and 1 237 answers were returned. The semantic differential technique was used. The scale had 57 bipolar pairs of adjectives that estimate an unknown number of dimensions of nurses’ attitudes towards an identified patient. The assessments were analysed using entropy-based measures of association combined with structural plots. The analysis revealed four dimensions, which related to licensed practical nurses’ opinions of the patients: an ethical and aesthetic dimension; an ability to understand; an ability to experience; and an ability for social interaction. The results of the study indicated that, on the positive to negative attitude continuum, the nurses’ attitudes fell at the positive to neutral end. This is an important finding owing to the personhood perspective, from which it is reasonable to assume that, with a more positive attitude to people with dementia, the prerequisites for person-centred care will improve. (shrink)