Linda Estman

• PhD
• Professor at University of Stavanger

Background An ethical foundation for caring involves doing good, alleviating suffering, and treating human beings with dignity and respect. While virtual reality (VR) has primarily been used to develop clinical skills, there is limited research on its use for educating healthcare personnel in ethical competence and the use of VR grounded by ethical...

Maintaining good physical condition throughout life might reduce the risk of disease and improve older persons’ physical and mental health. Several positive outcomes in the care of home-living older persons have been linked to technological solutions such as humanoid robots. The aim of this study was to develop a humanoid robot-led physical exercis...

Introduction An increasing population and a shortage of identified potential organ donors are causing the waiting list for organ transplants to grow continuously. Donation after circulatory death (DCD) is a method aimed at meeting the demand for transplantable organs. However, it presents new challenges in nursing care, and there is a lack of studi...

Introduction: The sustainable implementation of socially assistive robots in a pharmacy setting requires that customers trust the robot. Our aim was to explore young adults’ anticipations of and motives for trusting robot medication counseling in a high-stakes scenario. Methods: Through a co-creation approach, we co-designed a prototype application...

Background Communication is a key tool in the nursing profession. It is known that listeners are sensitive to the speaker's voice and interpret the speaker's intentions primarily from the non‐verbal signal conveyed. Aim To map and discuss the current state of knowledge and research evidence on professional voice use in health and nursing care. De...

This qualitative caring science study aims to seek a deeper understanding of loss and health after a life change viewed from a male perspective. In-depth interviews with 15 men were analyzed with thematic analysis. The results highlight seven themes: losing connection and belonging, losing control, losing oneself, belonging to a community and havin...

Background and Aim Leaving a religious community may occasionally lead to suffering in a human being's life and difficult existential life issues, such as loss of social relationships, identity and well‐being. Only a few studies have been conducted on what kind of care and support human beings who are suffering need in this context. The aim of this...

Leaving a religious community may, under certain circumstances, lead to significant changes in an individual’s life. The aim of this caring science study was to gain a deeper understanding of what caring for a client after religious disaffiliation is from the perspective of care professionals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine car...

Background and aim: Previous studies show that life transitions can have negative effects on men's lives and lead to health problems and meaninglessness in life. This study aims to deepen the understanding of men's health by exploring the movement between suffering of life and meaning in life when experienced life transitions. Theoretical framewo...

Background: The organ donor process is challenging, not at least for intensive care nurses. The situation changes radically, from intensively working to save the patient's life to instead caring for the donor patient's organs so that those, in turn, can save another patient's life. The donation process challenges nurses' view on what dignified cari...

Background and aim Vitality is described as ‘life energy’, ‘inner strength’ and ‘inner health resource’ and is the essence of health. Especially during the ageing process, it is of fundamental importance that an individual's health resources are strengthened to support work ability. The need for health services increases as the population ages and...

The use of robotic technology in healthcare is increasing. The aim was to explore attitudes toward the use of humanoid robots in healthcare among patients, relatives, care professionals, school actors and other relevant actors in healthcare and to analyze the associations between participants’ background variables and attitudes. The data were colle...

Creative writing is a known valuable aid for reflection on one’s life and involves the human being in a holistic way. This article has a caring science perspective and focuses on the understanding of life when creative writing is used to tackle unforeseen change. The unsolicited narratives of three authors were analysed in a study. The included tex...

Background and aim: There are many circumstances where an individual, either voluntarily or involuntarily, may leave part of their life behind. Religious disaffiliation, the focus in this study, has become increasingly common and may under certain circumstances have a profound impact on a human being's life, health and well-being. The aim of this c...

Humanoid robots have already been shown to be useful in healthcare. To ensure successful interactions with humanoid robots, is it essential that the factors that influence users’ sense of security be understood. Ensuring patients’ sense of security is considered a key principle of good caring. The aim of this study was to illuminate users’ sense of...

The aim was to examine how humanoid robots have been used in the care of older persons and identify possible benefits and challenges associated with such use from older persons’ points of view. The study was a scoping review based on Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework. To identify peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed literature, a system...

Background For about 40 years, Katie Eriksson developed the caritative caring theory at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. However, a description regarding the most substantial concepts and the relationships between these is lacking and thus needs to be explored. Aims The aim of the study was twofold: to explore and describe central concepts in...

In this paper, we explore the concept of virtue in nursing care. We particularly examine the description of ‘virtue’ offered by Aristotle, who considers it the mental constitution that forms the basis for laudable social behaviour. We then turn to Katie Eriksson's work on caritative caring ethics and draw parallels between the Aristotelian concept...

Background: The aim of this study was to examine workplace interventions that support older employees' health and work ability and the effect of these interventions. Methods: We used a scoping review, a type of a systematic literature review in which selected published academic articles and grey literature reports are included, to answer the fol...

The objective of this study is to describe adult patients’ and their family caregivers’ experiences of patient education in the hospital-at-home care context. Methods included a cross-sectional descriptive study including three hospital-at-home units in Finland. Adult, non-palliative patients (n = 27) and their family caregivers (n = 18) were inter...

The previous research describes creative writing to have a potential for self-care and healing in relation to illness and mental health conditions. The aim of this article was to deepen the understanding of creative writing and human becoming, from a caring science perspective. A data material consisting of answers from an e-form and diaries was an...

Background and aim: All human beings have the need to feel connected with others. However, researchers have found that for those aged 80+, loneliness markedly increases and that such loneliness is often linked to life changes or the loss of a close relative. The loss of a life partner is considered to have a greater impact on men's identify, socia...

The promotion, maintenance, and improvement of well-being among the oldest old population is becoming a great public health concern. This study aimed to explore the experiences of individuals aged 80 plus regarding their mental well-being (MWB) and its contributing factors in four European countries. A qualitative approach was followed, with twenty...

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how participants aged 80 years old or over describe their mental well-being—exploring the suitability of the model of healthy ageing when outlining the mental well-being concept. Methods: Six structured focus group interviews with 28 participants were conducted in Western Finland in 2017. Qualitative content ana...

This study focuses on identifying natural caring for the human being through creative writing. It offers increased understanding of creative writing through a case study. It illustrates caring in written texts created by one participant during 17 years and in an interview. The results of the study show three themes of natural caring in an analysis...

The aim of this study was to describe researchers’ experiences of participation in reflective dialogues through a hermeneutic application research approach. The aim was also to describe their perspectives on application, that is, the inner appropriation and application of theory into practice and vice versa. Twenty-one clinical coresearchers and fo...

Sammanfattning Tidigare forskning visar att forskningspersonernas deltagande i forskning kan påverka deras hälsa på ett positivt sätt. Denna studie utgår ifrån antagandet att det finns en vårdande potential i en del forskningsmetoder. Syftet med föreliggande studie är att belysa kliniska medforskares upplevelse av vad som är det vårdande i en refle...

The authors present letterwriting as a hermeneutic research method in that it contributes to the methodological development within the hermeneutical research tradition in caring science. The hermeneutic methodology is inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Hermeneutic letterwriting in accordance with Gadamer’s thought is a form of dialogue in writing, whe...

Background While sustainability is a key concept in many different domains today, it has not yet been sufficiently emphasized in the healthcare sector. Earlier research shows that ethical values and evidence-based care models create sustainability in care practice. Objective The aim of this study was to gain further understanding of the ethical va...

Background Dignity has been highlighted in previous research as one of the most important ethical concerns in nursing care. According to Eriksson, dignified caring is related to treating the patient as a unique human being and respecting human value. Intensive care unit patients are vulnerable to threatened dignity, and maintaining dignity may be c...

Protracted bodily pain is a phenomenon that often affects a human being's whole life. Care of human beings with protracted pain is challenging because pain is not always measureable, and the experiences of pain are subjective, unique and shapeshifting. Therefore, the aim is to highlight what protracted bodily pain signifies for the human being, and...