Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)

Committee Chair

Abigail Garlock

Abstract

Rapid response teams were implemented in efforts to combat mounting safety concerns among hospitalized patients. Numerous differing team compositions exist across the nation, however, most teams are led by a critical care nurse. Responsibilities of the rapid response team, in addition to unit based responsibilities, can lead to the feeling of being overwhelmed. Literature focusing exclusively on the feelings of the rapid response team member is obsolete. A qualitative study using the Parse research method was used to answer the research question: What is the structure of the critical care nurse’s living experience of feeling overwhelmed during rapid response calls? Seven participants, representing day shift and night shift, that serve in a dual role of an intensive care clinical supervisor and rapid response team member were used as the purposive sample population. Dialogical engagement, extraction-synthesis, and heuristic interpretation were used for participant language collection and data analysis. The central finding of this study was: feeling overwhelmed is profound responsibility along with a lack of resources/support that creates self-reliance. Structurally transposed as: feeling overwhelmed is obligatoriness coupled with persistent struggle rendering sovereignty. These feelings left unaddressed could progress to compassion fatigue.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Nursing Commons

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