Centralized lecture program for student nurses.

Death through pregnancy loss is a tragedy which touches nursing staff as well as parents. Exposed to the intense emotions of parents, nurses must simultaneously manage their own emotions. This paper explores how nurses, through the use of personal narratives, develop and construct meanings around the professionally defined, but personally experienced, event of pregnancy loss. The methodology was based on in-depth interviews with fourteen nurses working in gynaecological units in Northern Ireland. The author, through the exploration of the nurse's perspective, concludes that emotion can be conceived of as a valid resource for professionals when integrated into a nurse's matrix of professional understandings. In addition, the study also demonstrates that value should be attached to emotional work which may not be fully visible, particularly for nurses working in gynaecological units. The emotional needs of nurses need to be fully acknowledged through recognition of the importance of managed emotion in the construction of professional knowledge. There is, therefore, strong justification for supporting the recognition of the importance of emotion in the development of nurse education policies and in valuing aspects of nursing practice that may have been marginalized.

Education, Nursing↗

PubMed2005

What we know and what they do: nursing students' experiences of improvement knowledge in clinical practice.

Nations around the world face mounting problems in health care, including rising costs, challenges to accessing services, and wide variations in safety and quality. Several reports and surveys have clearly demonstrated that adverse events and errors pose serious threats to patient safety. It has become obvious that future health professionals will need to address such problems in the quality of patient care. This article discuss a research study examining improvement knowledge in clinical practice as experienced by nursing students with respect to a patient-centred perspective, knowledge of health-care processes, the handling of adverse events, cross-professional collaboration, and the development of new knowledge. Six focus groups were conducted, comprising a total of 27 second-year students. The resulting discourses were recorded, coded and analysed. The findings indicate a deficiency in improvement knowledge in clinical practice, and a gap between what students learn about patient care and what they observe. In addition the findings suggest that there is a need to change the culture in health care and health professional education, and to develop learning models that encourage reflection, openness, and scrutiny of underlying individual and organizational values and assumptions in health care.

Education, Nursing↗