Nurses create a rehabilitative milieu.

Despite the recognition of milieu therapy as a nursing intervention, nursing's contribution to the creation of inpatient environments that facilitate patient rehabilitation has been underresearched. A large study conducted in five inpatient rehabilitation units in Australia that sought to develop a grounded theory of nursing's contribution to inpatient rehabilitation has begun to address this gap in the literature. Analysis of data collected from 53 nurses during interviews and observations of their everyday practice revealed that nurses act purposefully to create a milieu conducive to rehabilitation. In doing so, they target all patients using a range of strategies that include allowing time, keeping patients'spirits up, protecting patients from embarrassment, and making hospitals more homelike than is typically experienced in acute-care environments. As a consequence, rehabilitative milieu therapy is proposed as a subset of milieu therapy.