EXPERIENCE IN EVERYDAY NURSING PRACTICE: A STUDY OF 'EXPERIENCED' SURGICAL WARD SISTERS.
Contributors: University Of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
Published: 1990
Number of pages: 306
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF.

Experience in practice is frequently talked about in nursing but seldom examined with the rigour and depth it merits. The aim of this interpretative study is to explore the nature of everyday experience in nursing practice and its relationship to the development of nursing expertise.

The study took place in two acute care hospitals in a Scottish city. Participants were ten surgical ward sisters, considered by their nursing managers to be excellent, experienced clinical nurses. Field notes and interview transcripts were produced from two periods of participant observation and three interviews with each Sister, along with a group interview. A hermeneutic interpretation was undertaken with the text and the subsequent interpretations were validated with the Sisters and other nursing colleagues.

Everyday experience, as revealed through the systematic analysis of the interview transcripts and field notes, appeared more complex and fluid than the empirical literature generally suggests. Experience was found to be closely linked to the Sisters' moment-by-moment practices, which emerged as purposeful, complex, multifaceted and patient-centred. The Sisters' practices are aimed at making the ward work in order to help individual patients towards recovery. Underlying these practices, a process of noticing, understanding and acting could be discerned. Through this process, which stems from a stance of involvement and care, the Sisters are attuned to experience: their own, the experience of others around them, but most importantly perhaps, to the patients' experience. It is suggested that being attuned to experience is critical to developing expertise in practice. Concomitantly, expertise emerges as relational and context-specific.

Current discussions in nursing concerning practice, experience, knowledge and learning frequently distinguish as discrete entities, notions such as theory and practice, learning and experience, action and reflection. Proposals are then made to bring these entities together. It is argued that such notions are revealed to be inextricably intertwined in everyday nursing practice and experience. Thus, more subtle distinctions are advanced. A notion of 'knowing-in-practice', which is both theoretically and practically imbued, is proposed. Knowing-in-practice is temporal, located solidly in the present situation, but drawing from the past and acting towards future possibilities. It develops through being attuned to experience.

Finally, implications for clinical practice, basic education and staff development are discussed. It is suggested that hermeneutic phenomenology offers a fruitful way to study everyday experiences and practices while maintaining their contextual and experiential integrity.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-07, Section: B, page: 3325.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (UNITED KINGDOM), 1990.

School code: 0450.