Search

This qualitative study identifies and describes different ways in which newly graduated nurse anesthetists (NAs) experience and perceive nurse anesthesia. It explains different approaches to nurse anesthesia care and, thus, to clinical nursing care (in an anesthesia and surgical context), provided by new NAs. One month after graduation, all NAs who had completed an anesthesia nursing program responded to 4 open-ended questions. A phenomenographic method was used to analyze their responses. The results were divided into 3 categories, which describe nurse anesthesia from the perspectives of (1) maintaining physical well-being; (2) being protectors and advocates; and (3) ability to perform good nurse anesthesia given all the demands placed on the NAs. The results indicate that, for the new NAs, the nurse anesthesia care situation was largely influenced by context and generated feelings of inadequacy because the NAs could not provide the emotional support that they believed their patients required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses problem situations in the context of anaesthesia care. It considers what it means for nurse anaesthetists to be in problematic situations in the anaesthesia care of older patients. Benner's interpretive phenomenological approach proved useful for this purpose. Paradigm cases are used to aid the analysis of individual nurses' experiences. Thirty narrated problematic anaesthesia care situations derived from seven interviews were studied. These show that experienced nurse anaesthetists perceive anaesthesia care as problematic and highly demanding when involving older patients. To be in problematic anaesthesia care situations means becoming morally distressed, which arises from the experience or from being prevented from acting according to one's legal and moral duty of care. An important issue that emerged from this study was the need for an ethical forum to discuss and articulate moral issues, so that moral stress of the kind experienced by these nurse anaesthetists can be dealt with and hopefully reduced.