This thesis will explore the phenomenon of Narrative Nursing. Narrative Nursing represents an humanistic approach to the patient and advocates the need to contextualize the clinical data, integrating them with information regarding the individual's perception of the disease and the meaning they attribute to it. The narrative approach thus represents a tool that can detect qualitative information useful to redefine clinical practice.
In writing this paper, I have been motivated by the belief that this topic could be interesting for nurses, and that – integrated with the essential scientific approach - it should become part of their professional background.
The thesis starts by dealing with the fundamental aspects of Narrative Nursing: its historical roots, the need of integration with the traditional method, the definition of nursing as the science of caring, the subjectivity of the experience of disease, the value of empathy in assisting patients and the experience of illness as an autobiographical turning-point. The paper then describes the different concrete practical opportunities for Narrative Nursing as, for example, counselling intervention and the narrative interview. It also presents an overview of the Italian health care context in order to highlight the usefulness of this kind of approach, and, at the end, it recounts a project of Narrative Medicine directed towards patients affected by pulmonary idiopathic fibrosis.
In conclusion, this thesis finds that, especially in the light of patient-centred care, the tools that Narrative Nursing offers can be viewed as valuable allies in interpreting the deeper need of care and in ensuring treatment programs that are more sustainable for patients and their family members, as well as in definitively characterizing nurses as professional carers.
