Objectives: To gain a deeper understanding of surgical nurses’ experiences of existential issues in cancer care.
Methods: Written critical incidents were used to collect nurses’ descriptions and reflections of critical care situations involving existential issues. Individual face-to-face interviews were conducted as follow-up using semi-structured questions which were analysed with hermeneutical analysis.
Preliminary results: The analysis showed that nurses in surgical care experience caring from different positions. Nurses either focus on the patient as a whole in the caring process or nurses focus more on medical information in the caring process. When focusing on the patient as a whole existential issues are considered to be a natural part of the caring process and nurses’ personal experiences help to enable encounters with the patients. When focusing more on the medical information in the caring process there was a transfer of responsibility to others, mainly the physicians.
Preliminary conclusions: This study highlights that existential issues are indeed part of surgical cancer care derived from existential care situations. Nurses’ focus in the caring process differs. Nurses express different positions in caring and not all acknowledge patients’ existential issues as part of nurses’ responsibility. When lacking common strategies in the organization nurses derive existential caring strategies from personal experiences.