Aim: The overall aim is to develop knowledge about learning to live with diabetes. Methods: All four studies have been carried out within the caring science and using a life-world phenomenological approach. Study (I): data was collected through written narratives from seven patients with insulin treatment. Studies (II and III): data was collected through interviews with twelve patients with diabetes. Study (IV): Data was collected from four groups and two individual interviews with sixteen diabetes nurses. The method for the analysis can be described as a dialectic process, beginning with the whole, analyzing its parts, and then reconstructing the whole in order to understand the essence of the phenomenon. Main Findings: The result showed that patients’ experiences of the most obvious meanings of the phenomenon of being stricken by diabetes (I) are the fight against becoming your illness, a wish that everything would be as usual and that the new situation should only be natural. Furthermore, after having been diagnosed with the illness, the results demonstrated two themes that were particularly important in learning to live with diabetes. These were your own responsibility for gaining knowledge in order to incorporate the illness into your life and to find a balance between fear and control (II). As support for the learning (III), reflection over the learning and experiences has a crucial role for a new understanding of health processes. Insight into your own responsibility was a key factor for this reflection. To be able to give support (1V), the diabetes nurse must adopt a reflecting, self-critical attitude with an insight that the responsibility for learning lies with the patient and that the role for the diabetes nurse is to encourage and challenge the patient to self-reflection and taking responsibility on the basis of individual goals and pre-requisites. To give support in this way, the diabetes nurse must downplay the medical requirements for control and make more use of his/her medical competence to ask reflection-triggering questions based on a life-world perspective. Conclusion: Based on the patient’s life-world, an understanding is created that supports learning, which thereby can reduce the influence of the illness on the patient's life. This understanding makes it possible to incorporate the illness into the patient's life and create a balance between fear and control.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-67490 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Johansson, Karin |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för hälso- och vårdvetenskap (HV), Region Kronoberg, Växjö |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Linnaeus University Dissertations |
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