[Evaluation of nursing processes in psychiatry--a field study project]

Professional nursing care can be characterised as a support in handling of and coping with activities of daily living. While somatic care mainly focusses on the compensation of physical complaints, the needs in the field of psychiatry leading to nursing interventions are quite different. The descriptive and explorative study presented here aims at finding typical needs for psychiatric nursing care and characteristic intervention patterns of nurses. Within the setting of a qualitative field study in an anthroposophically oriented hospital for mental disorders heuristic methods (Grounded Theory) were applied to evaluate those nursing events which induced a unique and specific nursing benefit. The narrative data from 59 episodes generated this way yielded four typical patterns of interpretation of nursing needs: integration versus autonomy and routine nursing versus crisis intervention. Our results are limited by the fact that only data of one hospital were analysed. However, due to quality control of internal and external validity, and adjustment of the results towards current findings it can be concluded that the study results have a heuristic potential for describing and precising other settings within and outside psychiatric care.