Capacity for Care: Meta-Ethnography of Acute Care Nurses’ Experiences of the Nurse-Patient Relationship

This chapter reports findings of a meta-ethnography of published qualitative research on nurses’ experiences of nurse-patient relationships in acute settings, reported in detail in Bridges et al. (2012a). Concerns are growing that modern healthcare delivery is lacking in compassion and is failing to provide the individualized care required by, for instance, older people with complex needs (Firth-Cozens and Cornwell, 2009). Promoting meaningful connections with patients in which practitioners see each patient ‘as a person to be engaged with rather than a body to do things to’ (Nicholson et al., 2010, p. 12) requires nurses and others to be able to articulate and appreciate the nature of these connections and their impact on patient outcomes, along with an understanding of the factors that can promote or inhibit therapeutic relationships. Nurses and nursing are now often portrayed as lacking in compassion and being distracted from these aspects of care (Flatley and Bridges, 2008). A range of high-profile reports in the United Kingdom into the quality of in-patient care for older people suggest that many of the reported problems centre on a lack of humanity in hospital staff, particularly nurses. While good practice does exist, we understand little about the conditions in which high-quality, compassionate in-patient care is delivered. Insight into nurses’ experiences as they engage with patients is therefore critical to understand how best to support existing good practice and to focus service improvement initiatives. This focus is of particular importance in acute settings where patient throughput, service configuration and staffing patterns reduce contact time between staff and patients. In addition, we lack understanding about how nursepatient relationships, the act of caring and engagement in therapeutic relationships impact on nurses themselves.