[Neonatal nursing: the meaning of existential caring in intensive care unit]

Understanding that care to preterm infants goes through the various steps that are sometimes intertwined in the predominant routine in neonatal intensive care units, requires that the professionals understand the subtleties that hold between caring in the sense of activities and procedures performed in day-to-day, and caring in the existential sense of being and caring for others. This study, in a Heideggerian phenomenological approach, aimed to reveal the existential sense of caring for mothers of premature babies admitted to Neonatal Intensive Care Units. After approval by the Research Ethics Committee, it was conducted interviews with nine mothers. The analysis by the Heideggerian method unveiled that the being-mother, while being-with-the-son, also feel cared for by professionals who provide that faces this existential moment in a safer manner.