Nurses' empathy with newborns hospitalized in neonatal intensive care units

Abstract

Objective: To understand the experience of nurses' empathy with newborns hospitalized in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Methods: This is a hermeneutic phenomenological research. Eleven interviews were conducted with nurses from a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, located in Cuiabá/Mato Grosso, Brazil. The collection took place between May and August 2018. The data were analyzed according to the thematic analysis proposed by Max van Manen. Results: Nurses interact with several newborns during their work, of these interactions only a few gained the specificity of being signified as empathic. In empathy, nurses are instructed by the meaning they attribute to the experience of seeing the newborn in the incubator, among them, the meaning of having maternal affection or not, the reading of the expression of crying, the burden of painful procedures suffered by the newborn, the time of hospitalization and the identification of pain stand out. The behavior that nurses had when they were empathic expresses an affective centrality with the use of the body that takes the baby on the lap, chat, caress, touches, partly by trying to supply the absence of mothers' affection. Conclusion: It is evidenced nurses' subjective work in episodes of empathy, and its potentialities in making nursing care humanized for hospitalized newborns, as well as the challenges and limitations that empathy can bring to nurses' work.