Toward a phenomenology of taking care

CONTEXT AND PURPOSE: From nurses to dentists and doctors, caregivers undergo significant initial and life-long training. This training, however, rarely addresses the subjective side of their practice, especially the lived experience of caregiving. Better understanding this experience can nevertheless help to build fruitful relationships with patients. We focus on what it is like to take care of someone else and attempt to outline an encompassing “phenomenology of care”. METHODS: We investigate the lived experience of caregivers during their first meeting with a patient. We rely on micro-phenomenological interviews, which offer fine-grained, first-person descriptions of someone’s holistic experience in a given situation. RESULTS: We show how the subjective experience of meeting a new patient can be structured with i) categories of micro-experiential acts (gathering information, assessing and performing actions), ii) the scopes of these acts, which involve inner and outer perceptions, various elaborations, regulations and interventions and iii) a range of experiential modalities. CONCLUSION: We highlight the richness of lived experience, and what all caregivers intimately share beyond the frame of their respective professions and practices. We discuss our results in terms of methodology, finalized and productive activities, pre-reflective aspects, and reflexive practice.