The meaning of technology in intensive care

Abstract

* This paper presents a discourse that focuses on the relationship between technology and caring in technologically intense environments.* Despite being constantly monitored and observed, intensive care patients often express that they feel invisible. The patient and the surrounding equipment easily meld into a unit, one item to be regulated and read.* From the patient's perspective, caregivers demonstrate keen vigilance over technological devices and measured parameters, but pay less attention to patients' stories and experiences.* Technology, with its exciting lure and challenging character, seduces the caregivers and lulls them into a fictive sense of security and safety in which technical tasks take precedence or have more urgency than caring behaviours.* The challenge for caregivers in intensive care units is to know when to heighten the importance of the objective and measurable dimensions provided by technology, and when to reduce the importance of the objective dimensions and magnifying the patients' lived experiences.