Consumer partnerships have been embraced as an important component of building high quality health care services. While nurses have the greatest contact with clients in hospital, little is known of their views about consumer participation or how they facilitate that participation at the bedside. Using focus group interviews and participant observation methods, this project explored nurses' approaches to working with consumers to support their participation in health care delivery. Findings indicate a sharp contrast between the ideas that nurses expressed and the actions observed in practice. It was clear from the interviews that nurses had adopted the rhetoric surrounding consumer participation, yet observational data revealed nursing practices that excluded active participation by consumers. Factors influencing nurses' facilitation of consumer participation were identified as the division of nursing labour in the setting, limited communication between nurses and patients and environmental constraints.
Issues of occupational health and safety are raised due to the increasingly demanding and often traumatic nursing work environment. Fears about stigma and loss of their nursing identity highlight nurses' perceptions that treatment programmes are often punitive in nature. Guidelines for the workplace addressing issues such as confidentiality, stress reduction and strategies for handling situations where a colleague is suspected of having a problem are beginning steps that will help address the problem of substance misuse in the nursing profession.
This article reports findings from a larger qualitative study conducted to gain
insight into the experience of fathers living with their chronically-ill children in
rural Victoria, Australia. Data were collected via unstructured interviews with four
fathers. The findings presented in this article explore the phenomena of
normalization for fathers within the chronic illness experience. Fathers described
normalizing the experience of living with their chronically-ill child as involving a
combination of various coping strategies and behaviours including: (1) accepting the
child’s condition, (2) changing expectations, (3) focusing energies on a
day-to-day basis, (4) minimizing knowledge-seeking behaviours, and (5) engaging in
external distraction activities. Findings highlight the complex and unique
normalization strategies these men utilized and contribute to knowledge and
understanding of the complex nature of raising a chronically-ill child in rural
Australia and provide a sound basis upon which to guide an ongoing and holistic
assessment of fathers with chronically-ill children.
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