Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Making Sense of Senses in Expert Nursing

Abstract

In this article, I draw on material from an ethnographic and phenomenological study of knowledge and professionalism among registered nurses working in a cancer unit at a Norwegian hospital. During the study, the use of the senses stood out as an important skill in nurses’ work with patients. The question to be investigated in this article is how the nurses acquire and use sensory knowledge in their clinical work. Building on a notion of knowledge as situated, embodied, and sensory, and learning as embedded in doing, this article contributes to and expands on the study of sensory knowledge in two respects. First, it foregrounds the processes and practices in which sensory knowledge is actually formed and used at a microlevel. Second, it highlights how an ethnographic and phenomenological exploration of the acquisition and use of sensory knowledge can contribute new insights into how expertise is cultivated in everyday clinical practice.

Wild data: how front‐line hospital staff make sense of patients’ experiences

“…In the patient experience industry, staff and staff experience have tended to be removed from what counts (or is counted), in spite of increasing evidence that patient and staff experience are linked (Dawson 2018 , Maben et al 2012 , Sizmur and Raleigh 2018 ). This is hardly a surprising finding, since it is the relational aspects of care that matter most to patients, and caring as a process is inherently interpersonal (Ihlebæk 2018 ). Informed by the practice‐based orientation of sociologies of the everyday, our findings suggest the importance of re‐introducing staff’s embodied experience into the patient experience ecosystem.…”

“…A potential criticism of this approach is that culture and intuition are tacit and elusive and cannot therefore form the basis of experience ‘data’. Demystifying the way in which healthcare staff ‘intuit’ what patients are experiencing, Ihlebaek has analysed how nurses acquire and use their senses in everyday clinical practice, noting that ‘nurses’ expertise is cultivated in continuous, embodied, sensory, and intersubjective relations in the doing of nursing’ (Ihlebæk 2018 ). In her study of knowledge and professionalism among registered nurses at a cancer unit in a Norwegian hospital, she found that nurses ‘relied not only on what they themselves had sensed, but also on the patients’ accounts of their own bodily experiences, as well as relatives’ stories’ ( Ibid : 493).…”

De l’analyse du travail sensoriel lors de prises de décision clinique au co-design d’un scénario de simulation

“…L'examen clinique qu'accomplit une infirmière s'effectue en partie en regardant le corps du patient, en palpant un abdomen, en sentant, en écoutant et en parlant au patient. Ainsi, la mobilisation des sens est une compétence essentielle que les infirmières utilisent dans leurs soins quotidiens aux patients (Ihlebaek, 2018). Cependant, cette compétence est rarement analysée en détail et fait donc rarement partie des formations que reçoivent les professionnels.…”

Qualitative research as reflexive process: a word limitationchallenge in qualitative medical research publications?

“…Furthermore, as explored above, in qualitative research data is generated in an embodied interaction between participant and researcher, and therefore the spatial and material setting may be of methodological and analytical importance (22). Spatial, sensuous and relational detail pertaining to the context of the data generation can thus be woven into the presentation of the findings showing the researcher's reflexive engagement with participants, place and the co-construction of data.…”