Qualitative health research
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This hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry reveals the meaning in critical care nurses' lived experiences of making a difference in practice with a view to deepening our understanding of nursing in pursuing nursing excellence. It serves to show how critical care nurses make a difference and what difference they make to critically ill patients in a manner that more fully captures nursing practice as enacted in the critical care setting. ⋯ Guided by the lifeworld existentials, these themes became the threads around which an interpretive-descriptive text was written. The authors wove other relevant sources of lived-experience material into the evolving text to assist with the explication of meaning.