The risk of entering relationships: experiences from a Norwegian hospital

Abstract

This article analyses how nursing students being trained in a Norwegian hospital interact and communicate with their patients -a task that seems to be one of the hardest of all for the students. Based on data from a fieldwork study, the article investigates the development of empathy among student nurses. In doing so, it addresses the concept of a social defence system developed by Isabel Menzies Lyth, who referred to a hypothetical construction describing certain features of a nursing hospital such as a high level of tension, distress and anxiety among the nurses. The findings point to the fact that the nursing students were constantly in danger of losing their focus on the relational aspect of their work; instead, they were being drawn towards an instrumental nursing style. This took place despite the conviction that 'creating a relationship' was one of the most important dimensions of being a competent nurse.

“They Stay With You”: Nursing Home Staff's Emotional Experiences of Being in a Close Relationship With a Resident in Long-Term Care who Died

“…Of note is how participants’ experiences with a close relationship strongly reflected the professional's own need for feeling recognition and appreciation in the relation with the deceased residents and their relatives. We can understand this as an expression of human interrelatedness and mutual dependency, aspects of which may resonate or interrupt in any professional relationships (Ramvi, 2011). Benjamin (2004, p. 5) defines such intersubjectivity in terms of “a relationship of mutual recognition” in which “each person experiences the other as a ‘like subject,’ another mind who can be ‘felt with,’ yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception.” Although our participants’ focus in long-term care is on the resident and next-of-kin, their experiences reveal how such work may also entail a profound sense of reciprocity when professionals become engaged in close caring relationships.…”

Thinking from experience in psychosocial practice: reclaiming and teaching ‘use of self’

“…The impulsion towards advocacy is then characterised by an excited moral outrage rather than a complex psychopolitical appraisal of both internal and external sources of oppression. Despite an overt emphasis on the experience or service users, AOP can be used as substitute for thinking from experience on the part of the professional, and can even be used as a social defense against anxiety when confronted with someone experienced as 'other' and the vulnerability entailed by entering into relationships with them (Ramvi 2011). At worst, students have been denunciated for being sexist, racist, or guilty of some other pejorative 'ism' from the student body itself.…”

I am only a nurse: a biographical narrative study of a nurse’s self-understanding and its implication for practice

“…The challenge for Maria, and for other nurses and policymakers, is to facilitate and value the development of the intangible emotional and empathic qualities of nursing practice [ 11 ]. In my own study of experiences from a Norwegian hospital [ 3 ], it appears to be a problem that the nurses and the hospital play down or turn a blind eye to the experience of anxiety and vulnerability in their relationships. This seems increasingly more problematic, since nursing is progressively more determined as an economically driven management model of service delivery [ 4 ].…”