Compassion in emergency departments. Part 1: nursing students’ perspectives

Compassion is a topical issue in clinical nursing practice, nurse education and policy, but a review of the literature reveals that nursing students’ experiences of compassionate care receives little attention. In this three-part series David Hunter and colleagues explore compassion in emergency departments (EDs) from nursing students’ point of view. Part one provides findings of a professional doctorate study of nursing students’ experiences of compassionate care in EDs, part two explores the barriers to compassionate care in this clinical setting that emerged from the study, and part three considers factors that enable and support compassionate care provision in EDs. Aim: The aim of the study was to explore nursing students’ experiences of the provision of compassionate care in EDs. Method: The underpinning methodology was an exploratory-descriptive qualitative design. A total of 15 nursing students from across the west of Scotland, who had been placed in eight different EDs, participated in face-to-face interviews which were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed. Findings: Two major themes emerged ‘doing the little things’ and ‘a strange, new world: the uniqueness of the ED’. The students also identified barriers and enablers to providing compassionate care which are discussed in parts two and three. Conclusion: Despite the challenges of working in the most acute of clinical settings, nurses can provide compassionate care to patients and their relatives. However, this is not universal because certain groups of patients considered ‘challenging’ do not receive equitable compassionate care

Defining Exploratory-Descriptive Qualitative (EDQ) research and considering its application to healthcare

No abstract available

Compassion in the emergency department. Part 3: enabling and supporting the delivery of compassionate care

In the final part of this three-part series, David Hunter and colleagues analyse the factors that enable and support delivery of compassionate care in emergency departments (EDs). Part one reported findings from doctoral-level research that explored nursing students' experiences of compassionate care in EDs, while part two considered the barriers to such care identified by the students. This article highlights and celebrates the ways in which emergency nurses provide compassionate care despite the challenges they face

Litigating the Carceral Soundscape

Sound has always been a material issue in prisons, whether it be in connection with sonic surveillance, the “silent cell,” or the insistence of sound (excessive noise, counter-carceral music making). This article asks: How and when does the carceral soundscape become a litigable issue? Our article opens with a discussion of the challenges involved in attempting to study the sonic ambiance of the penitentiary through the medium of written documents and proposes a methodology of “sensing between the lines” by way of a solution. It goes on to analyze the “moral architecture” at the foundation of the modern prison in an effort to excavate the sonic dimensions of incarceration in the context of a system that was designed with silence at its core. Solitude and silence were presumed to have an “emancipatory effect” on the prisoner by attuning the carceral subject to “the inner voice of conscience” through forced withdrawal from the distractions of the senses. The next part considers the ways that, despite attempts to manage sound, its insistence has resisted these forms of control. It presents solitary confinement as a crucial site to explore the ways in which enforced silence, as an organizing principle, has undergone several contortions that gave rise to alternative rationales such as “structured intervention,” yet has persisted. The article then explores how this enduring silence has figured in the contemporary case law, alongside other forms of acoustic violence, such as excessive noise and sonic resistance to the conditions of incarceration on the part of prison inmates (e.g., rapping to beat the rap). While some cases describe the experience of the prison as one of unbearable silence, others describe it as noise without respite. This research highlights the ways that sound in prison has remained an important site of discipline and contestation that reverberates through the case law, yet without being appreciated adequately by the courts. The article concludes with observations about the ways that probing the role of sound in the logic of incarceration can complement litigation efforts that question carceral logics