The Meaning of Emergency Care in the Iranian Nursing Profession

An emergency department (ED) has multiple patients with a wide variety of conditions that receive care simultaneously.
This study aimed at exploring the meaning of emergency care at a hospital emergency department.
A qualitative research design with content analysis method and purposeful sampling was used to identify the meaning of care. In-depth interviews were conducted with 17 Iranian emergency department nurses from 2 military hospital emergency departments in Tehran, during year 2015.
Three main categories emerged from the data. These categories included (1) accuracy, (2) speed, and (3) comprehensive action and caring attention. These 3 main categories represented the contextual meaning of emergency nursing care.
It was determined that the meaning of care in the studied context was different from other contexts, thus nurse managers must pay more attention to this diversity.