Families want to tell their stories and clearly have a need for nurses to develop relationships with them while caring for their ill loved ones. Family interviews both affirm the family and give nurses greater understanding of family issues, concerns and meanings.

Nursing care of families is essential to strong family support and maintenance of family health during a critical illness. Secondary data analysis of interviews conducted with 11 families with a family member in the intensive care unit revealed two essences: the family critical illness experience and the family vision for the kind of care families required and desired from nurses. The purpose of this article was to explicate the essence of these phenomena and their implications for family nursing practice. Findings affirm the need for a family intervention described in the literature, that of regularly scheduled nurse-family meetings. Although developed for work with families experiencing a chronic illness, bringing families together and inviting meaningful conversation about their experiences is appropriate for families experiencing critical illness. Nurse-family meetings acknowledge suffering and vulnerability of families when a loved one is critically ill and afford families an opportunity for honest sensitive communication with nurses.

If most mothers continually struggle to comply with perceptions of the "good mother" in the face of fatigue, self-doubt, and overwhelming emotion, what must the experience be like for HIV-infected women with dependent children to live and to mother day-to-day with an increasingly chronic, but still fatal, disease? The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain an understanding of the mothering and end-of-life issues faced by HIV-infected women with dependent children. Sixteen HIV-infected women reflecting diversity of ethnicity, age, number and ages of children, and health status were interviewed in depth. A phenomenon of mothering with HIV revealed a constitutive pattern of burden. Themes revealed were the burden of the diagnosis and health status, the burden of whether or not to reveal to children, the burden of an unknown future for themselves and their children, and relieving the burden of the diagnosis.

While the claim has been made that caring is the most important, central focus of nursing, often the meaning of caring presence in nursing and human caring in general is so deeply embedded in our consciousness and our cultural practices that its presence is invisible or taken for granted. The purpose of this Heideggerian hermeneutical study was to illuminate nurses' shared practices and common meanings of living a caring presence in nursing. Five nurses wrote a story, one they would never forget, of living a caring presence. The stories were analysed and interpreted against a background of Heideggerian philosophy to reveal the constitutive pattern, "caring as the presencing of being'. Meaning and complexity of the pattern were revealed in themes that illuminate and articulate the essence of nursing and the phenomenon of caring. Themes were: the timelessness and spacelessness of caring, creating home, and the call to care as the call of conscience. The results can help to answer the Heideggerian question of what a marginalized cultural practice like the profession of nursing can teach a levelling technological society about the meaning of being.

Our aim in this Gadamerian hermeneutic study was to understand maternal breastfeeding confidence and its meaning through listening to women's voices describing their experiences within the context of the United States. We asked 13 women, aged 23 to 42 years, who had breastfed a child within the last 2 years to tell us their breastfeeding stories. Women experienced maternal breastfeeding confidence as a dynamic interaction between their expectations, their infant(')s breastfeeding behavior, and sources of support. They described experiences that enhanced or diminished their confidence. Health professionals can use these findings to plan approaches that promote and support maternal breastfeeding confidence.