In the 1970s, nurses there had realised that patients needed to recover from intensive care, as well as in it, and it was they who started keeping patient diaries as a way of helping their patients make sense of their experiences. They came up with a beautifully simple practice: each day, a nurse writes an informal diary entry telling the patient what they have done, what has been done to them, and how they are. ‘We try to put ourselves into the patient’s place and describe what is happening, and how we think the patient is experiencing it,’ as one nurse puts it. The diary contains no medical
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