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The article highlights the contributions and value of the critical care-trained research nurse in pediatric intensive care (PIC) during the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Topics covered include the response of the PIC to the health crisis, the challenges associated with conducting research nursing during COVID-19, and the opportunities presented by the pandemic to both research nursing and nursing research.

The author reflects on the importance of learning the family-centered care among pediatric intensive care unit nurses in Great Britain. The author suggested that nurses must have clinical judgment, wisdom, and skill for them to carry out their role as medical personnel. He explained that, family centered care is the creation of emotional labor and at the same time to instill a sense of hope among their patients.

Equipment and procedures developed during the past several decades have made the modern intensive care unit (ICU) the hospital’s most technologically advanced environment. In terms of patient care, are these advances unmitigated gains? This study aimed to develop a knowledge base of what it means to be critically ill or injured and cared for in technologically intense environments. A lifeworld perspective guided the investigation. Nine unstructured interviews with intensive care patients comprise its data. The qualitative picture uncovered by a phenomenological analysis shows that contradiction and ambivalence characterized the entire care episode. The threat of death overshadows everything and perforates the patient’s existence. Four inter-related constituents further elucidated the patients’ experiences: the confrontation with death, the encounter with forced dependency, an incomprehensible environment and the ambiguity of being an object of clinical vigilance but invisible at the personal level. Neglect of these issues lead to alienating ‘moments’ that compromised care. Fixed at the end of a one-eyed clinical gaze, patients described feeling marginalized, subjected to rituals of power, a stranger cared for by a stranger. The roar of technology silences the shifting needs of ill people, muffles the whispers of death and compromises the competence of the caregivers. This study challenges today’s caregiving system to develop double vision that would balance clinical competence with a holistic, integrated and comprehensive approach to care. Under such vision, subjectivity and objectivity would be equally honoured, and the broken bonds re-forged between techne, ‘the act of nursing’, and poesis, ‘the art of nursing’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little documented knowledge about what is supportive from the perspective of relatives with a critically ill next-of-kin in the intensive care unit (ICU). The aim of the present study was to generate a theoretical understanding of what relatives experience as supportive when faced with the situation of having an adult next-of-kin admitted to critical care. The study was designed using a grounded theory methodology. Interviews were conducted with 29 adult relatives of adult ICU patients in southwest Sweden. Relatives described the need to be empowered and that support was needed to enable them to use both internal and external resources to cope with having a next-of-kin in critical care. To achieve empowerment, the relatives described the need to trust in oneself, to encounter charity and to encounter professionalism. The findings can contribute understanding and sensitivity to the situation of the relatives as well as indicating what form social support should take. It is essential that healthcare professionals understand how important it is for relatives to have control over their vulnerable situation and that they also reflect upon how they would like to be treated themselves in a similar situation. Recommendations for future practice are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]