Nordby Halvor
Faculty of Medicine, Department of Health and Society, The University College of Lillehammer, Lillehammer, Norway.
Nurs Inq. 2016 Sep;23(3):232-43. doi: 10.1111/nin.12134. Epub 2016 May 20.
A fundamental aim in caring practice is to understand patients' experiences of ill-health. These experiences have a qualitative content and cannot, unlike thoughts and beliefs with conceptual content, directly be expressed in words. Nurses therefore face a variety of interpretive challenges when they aim to understand patients' subjective perspectives on disease and illness. The article argues that theories on social simulation can shed light on how nurses manage to meet these challenges. The core assumption of social simulationism is that we do not understand other people by forming mental representations of how they think, but by putting ourselves in their situation in a more imaginative way. According to simulationism, any attempt to understand a patient's behavior is made on the basis of simulating what it is like to be that patient in the given context. The article argues that this approach to social interpretation can clarify how nurses manage to achieve aims of patient understanding, even when they have limited time to communicate and incomplete knowledge of patients' perspectives. Furthermore, simulation theory provides a normative framework for interpretation, in the sense that its theoretical assumptions constitute ideals for how nurses should seek to understand patients' experiences of illness.
护理实践的一个基本目标是理解患者对健康不佳的体验。这些体验具有质性内容，与具有概念性内容的思想和信念不同，无法直接用言语表达。因此，当护士旨在理解患者对疾病的主观观点时，他们面临着各种解释性挑战。本文认为，社会模拟理论可以阐明护士是如何设法应对这些挑战的。社会模拟主义的核心假设是，我们不是通过形成关于他人思维方式的心理表征来理解他人，而是通过以更具想象力的方式设身处地为他们着想。根据模拟主义的观点，任何理解患者行为的尝试都是基于模拟在给定情境中成为该患者是什么样的体验。本文认为，这种社会解释方法可以阐明护士是如何设法实现理解患者这一目标的，即使他们沟通的时间有限且对患者观点的了解不完整。此外，模拟理论提供了一个解释的规范框架，从这个意义上说，其理论假设构成了护士应如何寻求理解患者疾病体验的理想标准。
