AIDS as a call for nurse caring: A phenomenological perspective

The question that laid the basis for this study is: What is the meaning of nurse caring for patients with AIDS? This experience was unearthed through the phenomenological approaches of Van Manen and Munhall. The existential lived worlds provided the guide in amplifying the situatedness of participants. Through hermeneutical analysis, these themes emerged: being-with for another, knowing as a source of understanding and compassion, AIDS as stigma, AIDS as a call for nurse caring, connecting-severing, fear as a cause of dissonance, attachment by proxy, the experience of feeling for, corporeal vulnerability, the nurse as spiritless body, death as solace, and living time as hope. These findings were integrated with Roach's theory of nursing as the deliberate affirmation of caring as the human mode of being.