Conceptions of caring among a group of coronary care nurses

Background: During the last decade fundamental changes have taken place at coronary care units (CCUs) with regard to medical treatment and advanced technology in order to improve care for patients with coronary heart disease. In the past, caring in a coronary care context was described in qualitative studies mostly from the patients’ point of view. Coronary care nurses (CCNs) are considered to play a crucial role in this care although research into nurses’ conceptions of caring in this area is still scarce. Extended knowledge from the CCNs’ perspective could be of help in developing and implementing new, nurse-led interventions in a coronary care context. Aim: This study aims to describe the conceptions of caring among a group of coronary care nurses. Methods: This is an interview study. Phenomenographic interviews with open-ended questions were conducted with 21 purposefully sampled CCNs from CCUs at two different county hospitals. The audio-taped interviews took place between March and May 2013 and the data consist of 365 double-spaced pages. The age of the CCNs ranged from 23 to 63 years, the length of experience working as a registered nurse ranged from 1 to 42 years and experience as a CCN ranged from 0.5 to 27 years. A phenomenographic analysis according to the steps described by åkerlind was used. The interviews were read several times in order to gain an overall impression of the data. The central elements of the CCNs’ responses that focus on ’what’ and ’how’ were identified, condensed and summarised as a preliminary means of understanding a phenomenon. Similar responses were carefully grouped or classified and a comparison of the categories was made in order to establish the borders between them. The descriptive categories were created on the basis of similarities and differences. An iterative process was used throughout the data analysis to check interpretation against the interviews that had been transcribed verbatim and the description categories. The description categories were used to develop an ‘outcome space’ that described the wholeness of the findings. Results: The analysis is ongoing. At the beginning of 2014 we expect to present preliminary results and answer questions about qualitatively different conceptions of caring found among a group of CCNs working in CCUs and how the different conceptions of these individuals can be understood