Stories under construction: Exploring meaning-making on a geriatric ward

Experiences calling for meaning-making, such as encountering moral dilemmas or existential issues, are ineluctable in the everyday circumstances of persons on a geriatric ward, both patients and professionals. Narratives are a key form for constructing meaning and a powerful tool for expressing and understanding subjective experiences related to living and ageing. Furthermore, narratives can contribute to shifting healthcare towards a more person-centred and humane practice. However, there seems to be tension between individualistic and relational understandings of narratives in healthcare, which raises questions about how to access the experiences and stories of older persons in clinical practice. Using ethnographic data, narrative theory and an interpretative methodology, this study explores how narrative meaning-making processes take place and unfold in everyday practice on a geriatric ward, framed in terms of contextual conditions and person-centred care. Our findings are portrayed in narrative vignettes built around everyday situations on the ward and contribute to a processual understanding of how narrative meaning-making and person-centredness may interrelate and come about in everyday practice. Narrative meaning-making can be understood as an essentially intersubjective and ongoing practice that takes place in seemingly mundane activities, and it engages multiple persons whose meaning-making processes are interconnected and mutually affected by one another. An awareness of the opportunities for narrative meaning-making that exist within the interstices of more traditional healthcare procedures reveals neglected spaces for meaning-making, storytelling and partnership. •Narrative meaning-making is explored as an intersubjective and open-ended process.•A broadened understanding of stories brings opportunities for person-centredness.•Stories might be told, enacted and co-created in scattered ways over time and place.•Everyday situations in geriatric care offer openings for narrative meaning-making.•Meaning-making and person-centredness might be thwarted by mismatched reasoning.