Expertise/Competencies

The Lived Experience of Being Comforted by a Nurse

By Joan Bottoroff (UBC Okanagan) for Phenomenology Online. Comfort has always been an important goal of nursing care. On a day-to-day basis, nurses ask patients if they are comfortable and initiate interventions that are aimed at providing or enhancing comfort. Yet, for the most part, definitions and descriptions of comfort in the nursing literature are vague and abstract. Nurses have found it much easier to describe the experience of illness-related discomfort-the pain, chills, worry, the wrinkled sheet, the loneliness-than to describe the experience of comfort.