Why do nurses remain in everyday practice?
By Margareth Kristoffersen, PhD; Associate Professor at Department of Health Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway
From SAGE Open Nursing
“The question of why nurses remain in everyday practice within the field of health care and thereby their profession is a complex one. In this study, I have tried to develop a comprehensive model that gives a deeper understanding of the question by pointing to the qualitative worth of different desires and exploring how nurses’ awareness of their desires impacts whether they remain or not. The model was developed as a schematic model, grounded in the empirical findings of an earlier study, the aim of which was to understand the significant factors that made nurses remain in everyday practice. My data set comprised qualitative interviews with 13 nurses. The model re-contextualizes empirical findings from the earlier study into a clearer conceptual frame, which places remaining in everyday nursing practice into an appropriate theoretical context. The model links incorporated concepts, and visualizes and verbalizes them.
If you ask me about the added value of this model, I would point to two key concepts or constituent elements: horizons of identity and self-understanding. The model links nurses’ horizons of identity to resources such as language, culture, and society, with self-understanding contained within.. It includes that the nurses are what they are and prioritize what they do because they live in a larger context that plays a role for them. They evaluate the qualitative worth of different desires or goods related to remaining, and take a stand. What does this mean in practice though? It means that nurses that choose to remain in practice are constantly extending and developing their horizons. Nurses’ identity were affected by patients, colleagues and society, and also by their opportunity to create something good for the patient and themselves. They believed that the situation could be better tomorrow. In this sense, the specific added value of the current model is that remaining in everyday nursing practice is linked to realization of self as a nurse, by contributing to creating something for oneself and the patient. The nurses hoped to make life as good as possible by helping a patient with his or her needs but also wished to become better people. They stated that they had the capacity to work closely with patients while distancing from them at the same time, enabling them to have a calming effect on agitated patients. Having these kinds of hypergoods about realising your professional worth is quite different from having a desire described as a positive feeling towards continuing in one’s current position or an intention described as the stated probability of an individual staying in the current position.
My findings strongly emphasize how significant the qualitative worth of different desires were in nurses’ decision to remain. The interviewed nurses evaluated desires of worth and distinguished between different interpretations of ‘the good life’. In other words, the model shows that remaining can occur through a process of identification and taking standpoints, which in turn has the potential to empower nurses to realize themselves.”
Article Details:
Nurses' Remaining in Everyday Nursing Practice—A Comprehensive Model
Margareth Kristoffersen, PhD
DOI: 10.1177/2377960819866343
From SAGE Open Nursing
Margareth Kristoffersen is an Associate Professor at Department of Health Studies. She has a PhD from the University of Stavanger, with a doctoral thesis titled ‘Striving for peaks, standing in adversity: remaining in nursing. A study of the importance of life views in the practice of nursing?’. Margareth Kristoffersen is a nurse and a nursing educator, with further education in diaconia, pedagogy, leadership and management as well as supervision. Her research interests focus on the moral-philosophical ideas in the nursing discipline. She looks at how ideas such as relationality, self-understanding, identity and self-realization are expressed by nurses in their everyday nursing practice and how this influences their decision to remain in the profession. She also works with developing PhD candidates? competence as professionally relevant and practice-oriented researchers.
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