Making Sense of Suffering and Death: How Health Care Providers' Construct Meanings in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

ABSTRACTBiomedical technology has progressed at a pace that has created a new set of patient care dilemmas. Health care providers in intensive care units where life-sustaining therapies are both initiated and withdrawn encounter clinical scenarios that raise new existential, theological, and moral q...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of religion and health
Authors: Cadge, Wendy (Author) ; Catlin, Elizabeth A. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V. [2006]
In: Journal of religion and health
Further subjects:B Religion and spirituality
B Neonatology
B Death
B Suffering
B health care providers
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:ABSTRACTBiomedical technology has progressed at a pace that has created a new set of patient care dilemmas. Health care providers in intensive care units where life-sustaining therapies are both initiated and withdrawn encounter clinical scenarios that raise new existential, theological, and moral questions. We hypothesized that there might be broad patterns in how such staff understand these questions and make sense and meaning from their work. Such meaning making might be the key to working with the critically ill and dying while helping to create and sustain a meaningful context for personal living. This article presents themes evident in an in depth analysis of open-text responses to a spiritual and religious questionnaire survey completed by staff in one neonatal intensive care unit. The data reveal the central roles of perceived infant suffering and death in these providers' work experience and details how they understand the ultimate meaning of the suffering and death. We investigate patterns in how different providers articulate their individual attributes and motivations for working in intensive care. We found a surprising range of religious, spiritual, existential, and other meaning-making systems that underpin how staffs understand their work and how, certain of them, even define their purpose in life as caring for critically ill infants and their families.
ISSN:1573-6571
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of religion and health
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10943-006-9012-2