There is very little European research on intensive care nursing.

Abstract

There are only a few scientific journals in Europe which publish studies on intensive care nursing. The most important of them is Intensive and Critical Care Nursing (ICCNO, which (as its name implies) concentrates entirely on issues of intensive care. Other European journals, such as the Journal of Advanced Nursing and the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, occasionally carry articles reporting on the findings o f intensive care research. In Finland coverage of intensive care issues has been more or less non-existent in the biggest journal in the field, i.e. Hoitotiede ('Nursing Science'), but there is also a journal that is devoted specially to intensive care: Tehohoito is the journal of the Finnish Intensive Care Association. Having earlier studied the views of ward sisters in intensive care units (ICUs) in Finland as to what they regarded as the most important areas o f study in the field of intensive nursing care, we thought it would be interesting to compare those views with the coverage given to the issue in European journals. We decided to focus our analysis on the articles published in ICCN. This article reviews the subjects covered and also looks at the priority issues defined by the ward sisters we interviewed.