Background: The healthcare system’s unilateral focus on clock time has given motivation to explore the diversity of time and in particular the impact of time in vulnerable patients. When living with severe incurable disease, the diversity and impact of time become prominent.

Aim: Knowledge on patients’ experiences of time may be helpful both in planning, organizing, preparing and performing treatment and care for patients with short life expectancy. Especially to open up the communication with the patient and his/her relatives, this knowledge is important and therefore of general interest.

Theoretical frame: The philosophical and theoretical approach in this study is phenomenological. Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, has stated that consciousness of time is the most important area in phenomenology. Martin Heidegger, known as a master in phenomenology after Husserl, emphasizes the impact of our relationship to time with respect to being.

Method: An unstructured open-ended in-depth interview has been used with support of a theme guide reflecting different aspects of time. The data consist of 26 interviews from 23 participants receiving palliative care. The study was carried out from April 2009 to February 2010 in the respondent’s home or at different palliative care units in Hordaland County in Norway.

Preliminary result: Time, context and care are related. The patients feeling of security for themselves and their relatives determine whether the time feels good or bad. It is evident that our relationship to time is expressed by body language. The body also communicates a rhythm, when health worker and the patients have different rhythm the care can become an unpleasant experience. Patients, relatives and health workers are in different aspects of time, normally we are prospective, when death are approaching the future become uncertain, which can entail that it is a challenge to meet in harmony in the present.