The Bedside Care Environment as a Caring Space – From Shared Experience to Collective Innovation

The bedside care environment is often invisible, yet decisive. It is where treatments take place, conversations unfold, and the everyday life of healthcare is carried out. For patients, this environment can shape feelings of well-being and participation. For staff, it can determine workflow, ergonomics, and a sense of safety in their work.

In the project The Bedside Care Environment as a Caring Space, we aim to make the invisible visible. We explore how the immediate environment around the bed is experienced – and how it can be changed and improved. This means both understanding the perspectives of patients and healthcare staff and testing concrete ideas for the care environments of the future. Here, caring science and innovation meet in a joint search for solutions that make a real difference in everyday practice.

We study how physical solutions can contribute to a more caring environment and how these solutions actually work in practice.

As a student, you are invited to step directly into an ongoing research project that is both practice-oriented and forward-looking. You may contribute by analyzing interviews and observations, or by working creatively to develop and test new ideas within the project. Regardless of your background, there is room to find your own entry point.

The project is led by a researcher from Mid Sweden University, a regional research and innovation strategist, and a nurse with experience in healthcare innovation. We are looking for nursing students who want to explore how innovation can be understood as part of the nurse’s professional competence. At the same time, we welcome students from other disciplines to join us in exploring how interdisciplinary collaboration can contribute to developing and improving healthcare.