When I began my journey as a nurse, I never anticipated my career would progress to becoming a PhD student exploring long-term intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Caring for this group of patients is often challenging, due to numerous problems created by their initial critical illness. Progress is often slow, with complications throughout their ICU stay, and patients tend to suffer many psychological problems, such as delirium, withdrawn behaviour and depression. This makes them a complex and vulnerable group to care for.

My career in intensive care nursing began in 1989 in Australia. I had been working in a surgical ward when I discovered I had been placed on the ICU roster by nursing management. I was terrified–I had only graduated the previous year and had no idea of what intensive care nursing involved. Fortunately, the unit had a number of excellent senior nurses and an educator who supported my practice, thus my career as an intensive care nurse was established. My early education came from ward in-service, workbooks and an intensive care course facilitated by the hospital, which focused heavily on physiological principles of care for critically ill patients. The direction of my education changed when I began a clinical master’s degree at Massey University. For my first assignment, I found literature on ICU patients’ experiences of their illnesses. Consequently, I questioned my practice, I wondered about my colleagues’ practice and I was interested in how patients in the ICU experienced their illness trajectory. In my final master’s paper, I completed a qualitative research report which, retrospectively, examined patients’ experiences of being in an ICU. Interviewing patients in their own homes after a life-threatening illness was a profound experience, as I learnt how their experiences in ICU affected their well-being after discharge, when they had minimal or no