Abstract
Objective: The aim of this study was to elucidate how the intuition of expert nurses affected support for the families of patients with consciousness disorder urgently admitted to the intensive care unit.
Methods: Semi-structured interviews with six expert nurses working in an intensive care unit were conducted. On the basis of Bergson’s notion of intuition, we extracted words indicative of intuition along with the associated thoughts or actions and analyzed these qualitatively and descriptively. We also chronologically arranged entire scenarios of nursing support and analyzed their effect on intuition-based support for families.
Results: We found that the intuition of expert nurses allowed them to instantaneously understand a family’s situation. This intuition enabled the nurses to unconsciously infer the feelings of the family based on each family members’ expressions, such as movements of eyes and mouth. The expert nurses used their intuition to also recognize insecure and fluctuating feelings of the family to provide support in the form of observation or communication in accordance with the recognitions. Another finding was that the initial intuition of the nurses on meeting the family influenced subsequent thoughts and actions.
Conclusion: The expert nurses understand the family members’ fluctuating feelings using their intuition and consequently provide sensitive support based on their interpretation of these feelings. The findings of this study also indicate that the nurses’ thoughts influenced by intuition are associated with their actions for support.
