Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
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Giving Voice: Narrative Methods as Means to Transforming
Understanding of Patient Lived Experience
Ms Tina McGrath
Senior Occupational Therapist (Clinical Tutor)
B Sc (Hons) Curr Occ (Dubl.), MA (Adult & Community Education)
NUIM, H Dip SVRS UCD
Occupational Therapy Department
St Brendan’s Hospital
Rathdown Road
Dublin 7
Ireland
Tel No: 353 (0) 87 773 4969
Email: mcgrathtina@eircom.net
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
An Occupational Perspective
Occupational therapists work with the ongoing centrality of daily
occupations in human’s lives. The occupational perspective of
‘doing, being’ and becoming’ envisages people as agentic authors of
their own life narratives who literally ‘story’ the self by imbuing
selected actions with meaning and purpose. Humans are
perpetually engaged in ‘doing’, consciously acting on their worlds.
‘Being’ involves embracing our essence in our ‘doing’. ‘Becoming’
imbues being with a sense of purpose and future, holding out the
promise of self-actualisation. These self-stories form a coherent
life-plot linking past, present and future in a life configuration that
simultaneously creates and communicates the essence of the self.
Ethnographic research into occupational therapy interventions
reveals an ‘underground practice’ of narrative reasoning in clinical
practice, where therapists think and act through storytelling with
their clients. A complex process of ‘therapeutic emplotment’
emerges where these dyadic interventions create clinical narratives
in clinical space to engage in a prospective intervention story that
meaningfully matters to each individual client (Mattingly & Fleming,
1994).
Qualitative Paradigm
The increasing popularity of qualitative methods has opened up new
vistas of opportunity to healthcare researchers. Such approaches
permit insight into personal experiences of health and illness and
patient interpretations of these happenings.
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