Nurses recognized the help patients

Nurses recognized the help patients received from one another and often tried to facilitate relationships between patients. This inadvertently served two purposes — patients could connect with and receive guidance from someone who had ‘been there’, and nurses could focus on accomplishing tasks that did not involve direct patient care. Although nurses expressed a desire to care more directly and individually for patients, they also described being unable to do so because of organizational constraints. These constraints included low nurse–patient ratios, heavy administrative focus on documentation that ‘nobody looks at’, and performing time-consuming patient admissions that took them off the unit. Yet, despite difficulties with staffing and management of duties, almost all the nurses had a strong teamwork mentality. They described supporting each other with patient care, covering for each other if something needed to be done, and providing patient support whether it was ‘their’patient or not.