Promotion of Hope - In critically ill patients in Indonesia

Abstract: Indonesia is a developing country with diversity in cultures, religions and landscape. The country has the fourth biggest population in the world, spread over the world’s largest archipelagic country with more than 18 000 islands. Health care is slowly improving but still there is a problem in reaching people due to the cultural, financial and political situation. This study asks nurses how they can promote hope in patients that are critically ill, cared for in an intensive care unit in Indonesia. The intensive care unit patient is often very sick, sedated, intubated, monitored with many interventions and unable to communicate with the world other than through interpreted signs to and from the nurse. It is possible that it is difficult for the patient to address what or who helps him/her to develop any kind of hope in this situation. Five specialized intensive care nurses from two different intensive care wards were interviewed according to a qualitative approach with open-ended questions. The respondents each had more than 10 years of experience and consisted of both females and males. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed according to a content analysis (Lundman & Hällgren Granheim, 2008), with categories and sub categories as a result. The interviews showed that the nurses influence hope by using much interaction with both the patient and the family. The factors of family and religion showed however an interesting and very important role in how the nurses could reach the patient and his/her subjective wish for hopes. There is literature that supports the findings in the study but still the result can be discussed, as it was a single researcher with a small number of respondents using an interpreter.