Advanced Holistic Nursing Practice Narratives: A View of Caring Praxis

Advanced holistic nurses (AHNs), emerging as leaders in health care transformation, are described as caregivers, but caring and caring-within-practice are often difficult for AHNs to explicate. Nursing research that describes caring in advanced practice is limited. Only one study has been reported that focused on describing practice for advanced practice nurses. This article presents a secondary analysis of narratives from a larger qualitative study of holistic pediatric nursing practice. From that study, narratives provided by six holistic advanced practice nurse participants, working in a variety of settings, were extracted and analyzed to illuminate caring-within-practice. Participants were asked to write a reflective narrative on a patient exemplar of caring and use John’s model for structured reflection to provide a deeper reflection on their narrative of caring. Researchers analyzed the extracted narratives to identify common themes of caring-within-practice. Seven themes emerged depicting AHNs caring-within-practice: normalizing the environment, creating sacred space, being rooted in compassion, the art of being present, establishing trust-caring, coaching the family as caregiver, and inspiration for the future. This article provides excerpts from the narratives that support the themes, discusses the findings, and presents implications of the study.