Exploring the Impact of Storytelling for Hospitalized Patients Recovering from COVID-19 2023, Gurney et al

Abstract:
There are mental and physical deficits associated with COVID-19 infection, particularly among individuals requiring hospitalization. Storytelling is a relational intervention that has been used to help patients make sense of their illness experiences and to share their experiences with others, including other patients, families and healthcare providers.

Relational interventions strive to create positive, healing stories versus negative ones. In one urban acute care hospital, an initiative called the Patient Stories Project (PSP) uses storytelling as a relational intervention to promote patient healing, including the development of healthier relationships among themselves, with families and with healthcare providers.

This qualitative study employed a series of interview questions that were collaboratively developed with patient partners and COVID-19 survivors. The questions asked consenting COVID-19 survivors about why they chose to tell their stories and to flesh out more about their recovery process. Thematic analyses of six participant interviews resulted in the identification of key themes along a COVID-19 recovery pathway.

Patients’ stories revealed how survivors progress from being overwhelmed by their symptoms to making sense of what is happening to them, providing feedback to their care providers, feeling gratitude for care received, becoming aware of a new state of normal, regaining control of their lives, and ultimately discovering meaning and an important lesson behind their illness experience.

Our study’s findings suggest that the PSP storytelling approach holds potential as a relational intervention to support COVID-19 survivors along a recovery journey. This study also adds knowledge about survivors beyond the first few months of recovery.

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/11/4/589

 

Once upon a time there was a load of sugar-coated patient-blaming bollocks, with very little bearing on anyone’s prospects for living happily ever after. The end.

 

Canada really seems to be a hotbed for this sort of ethnographic research crap.

 

For God's sake stop all these patients whining, I can't stand it anymore! Make them say only nice positive things to me or I quit as a doctor.

 

Somehow, I don't think I've ever seen any psychological, and this is psych, not medical, study "exploring" anything that even bothered getting off the couch, it's always about things right in front of them, and only from one perspective.

It's all fluff meant for no one that acts as praise for people simply doing their job but in a way that makes it all about the healthcare system, rather than the patients. They always make it about themselves when "exploring" other people's perspective. Monoculture, monoperspective.

 

I find it a bit of a cheek from an epistemic injustice point of view too that one thing patients haven't had the opportunity to do is all give their testimony on their experiences of the condition and how the 'treatment ideologies' and 'treatments' have impacted their lives. Yet you then have people suggesting how storytelling should be phrased, curated or presented like 'recovery Norway' (and even 'who')

Storytelling as used by certain people seems to involve a rather different thing to 'allowing patients to tell their stories' - discuss...


EDIT:

With a big underline about 'ownership' and the cheek and arrogance after what has passed that 'owning' the truth and ergo narrative (let's be clear this feels what this sort of thing is about) should be questioned as being a basic right for patients.

There is a smell of this sort of thing effectively being about 'speaking over/for' patients even in their own witness testimony, which given we now firmly have it proven there is no psychological anything involved [particularly 'false beliefs' or 'positive thinking' anything] with either ME or LC as a cause there is no justification/excuse for, there should be red flags all over the place about why people would be allowed to do it.

Their claimed 'in the name of is' has been disproven by their own research over decades? Yet the impact of doing such things does not need research to say 'hiding or adjusting their truth is not an OK thing to do to anyone'?