Sammanfattning
Background: Parents often experience stress when their newborn child is admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)ward. Nurses who meet parents must have knowledge about communication and relational competence to provide support based on the parents’ experiences and needs.
Objectives: To describe a group of nurses’ experiences of what is important in the encounters and conversations with parents of a sick newborn child.
Method: The study has a qualitative design with a phenomenological approach, where the aim is to obtain an accurate description of the informants’ experience of a phenomenon. Individual interviews were conducted with five nurses at an NICU. The interviews were analysed according to a descriptive phenomenological research method.
Results: When meeting the parents, the informants described it as crucial to establish a relationship based on empathy, to see the individual parent, to facilitate the mutual exchange of information and to foster parents’ sense of coping. When these aspects were present, the informants experienced a good encounter and conversation with the parents, but if these aspects not were present, the encounters and conversations were described as less successful.
Conclusion: The results emphasize that when encountering parents of a sick newborn child, nurses have a responsibility to establish a relationship based on empathy and to treat each parent according to their own situation in order to help them cope with their vulnerable situation.