Nursing staff’s experiences of working in an evidence-based designed ICU patient room—An interview study
Section snippets
The intensive care unit environment
It is known that health care environment and lived space are important aspects of care. As early as in the nineteenth century Nightingale (1859) described the importance of the health care environment on health and wellbeing. She acknowledged the importance of aspects in the patients’ environment such as noise, light, ventilation and cleanliness as assisting the healing. But instead of embracing Nightingale’s philosophy, hospitals and intensive care units (ICUs) were built like industries with
Aim
The aim of this paper was to explore the experiences of nursing staff working in an Evidence-based designed ICU patient room.
Method
This study is explorative and data were collected through qualitative research interviews and analysed using inductive content analysis (Elo and Kyngäs, 2008). The method aims to achieve a condensed but broad description of the actual phenomenon under scrutiny and the outcome of the analysis is in form of concepts or categories that describe the phenomenon (Elo and Kyngäs, 2008, Polit and Beck, 2016).
Findings
Four categories with subcategories emerged from the analysis (Table 1). The findings are presented below and illustrated by quotations from the interviewees.
Discussion
This study indicates that the ICU environment itself can be experienced as a healing atmosphere for both patients and staff by building or refurbishing ICUs following the principles of EBD. Improving the healthcare environment led to the nursing staff experiencing a personal alertness and wellbeing that fostered their caring activities vis-á-vis the patients. Moreover, the findings revealed that an ICU patient room needs to be spacious in order to function well.
One of the most important roles
Limitations
The findings in this study provide a rich description of the experiences of nursing staff working in an evidence-based designed ICU patient room. Both CCNs and ANs were invited to participate but not physicians because, unlike CCNs and ANs, they are not at the bedside around the clock and they can therefore be seen as visitors to the patient room (Halford and Leonard, 2003). The open-ended interviews allowed the participants to talk freely, producing detailed descriptions concerning the subject
Funding sources
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, Sweden (grant number 521-2013-969). They had no involvement in any part of the research process.
Conflict of interest
There are no conflict of interest.
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