Nursing in critical care
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Nursing in critical care · Nov 2009
Recovering from the psychological impact of intensive care: how constructing a story helps.
Numerous studies have demonstrated both the risk of post-traumatic stress as a result of intensive care unit (ICU) treatment and the efficacy of successful narrative processing for recovery from psychological trauma. ⋯ ICU follow-up clinics could gain increased clarity of purpose from this narrative conceptual framework, eventually evaluating and validating benchmarks for assessing psychological recovery in relation to specified dimensions of narrative processing. Practice development informed by narrative process theory could also enhance ICU nursing communication. Since story construction is central to a person's core identity processes, person-centred nursing would also be implicated.