Rituals, ghosts and glorified babysitters: A narrative analysis of stories nurses shared about working the night shift

Working the night shift can be fraught and experienced as demanding and, yet, is often dismissed as babysitting. Few researchers have explored the social and cultural meanings of night nursing, including storytelling rituals. In 2019, a narrative study was undertaken. The aim was to explore the stories recalled by nurses about working night shifts. Thirteen Australian nurses participated. Data were gathered using the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, and narrative analysis produced forty stories and three themes: strange and challenging experiences; colleagues can be mentors (or not); and textbook knowledge is only part of what is needed on night shift. Nursing students who engage with these stories may come to understand the challenges of the night shift, and the valuable work that nurses engage in throughout a 24-hr period, work that involves adept psychosocial and interpersonal skills alongside technical and physical competence.

A thematic literature review of innovative strategies to prepare nursing students for aged-care

BACKGROUND

The exponential rise in people living longer but requiring residential care is adding pressure to already overstretched aged care nurses. Consequently, a person-centred care culture in residential care remains aspirational, rather than a reality. For nursing students in Australia and elsewhere, clinical placements in aged care facilities are under-utilised due to negative perceptions about the likelihood for learning. Creative strategies to engage students to safely challenge ageist thinking and to inspire enthusiasm for learning in this context are needed.

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of this thematic review of the literature is to better understand challenges related to learning in aged care settings and identify innovative strategies to enhance nursing student learning experiences in residential aged care placements.

REVIEW METHODS

A literature review was undertaken in 2019 using CINAHL, PUBMED, Elsevier, Medline, ProQuest and Google Scholar. The search was limited to papers that were peer reviewed, in English, and published between 2001 and the date of review (mid-2019) in order to situate the review in the new millennium.

RESULTS

47 articles and books were included in the review that introduce solutions and innovative strategies that could be used to improve students' attitudes to learning in aged care and from older people. The literature review was categorized into three main themes, including: barriers to working with older people; the need for pedagogical change to foster empathy; and innovative strategies to address barriers.

CONCLUSION

These themes are useful to consider in designing engaging learning and teaching for nursing students to be effective in working in aged care.

Illuminating nursing's shadow side through a Jungian analysis of the film Fog in August

Fog in August is a German film based on Robert Domes' historical novel of the same name. The film provides a fictionalized account of the institutionalization and eventual killing of children and adults labelled as a burden on the State and unworthy of life. On one level, this is a story of good versus evil, where innocent patients are manipulated by callous doctors and nurses. At a deeper level, however, it is possible to read the characters as more complex and such a reading gives an insight into the paradox of how a genocidal policy was able to be systematically implemented by health care professionals who had previously taken an oath to provide care to all people. Carl Jung argued that powerful stories, told across generations, contain mythical archetypes that help drive the plot and convey beliefs about humanity. The aims of this paper are to explore Jungian ideas within Fog in August that help the historical story it is based on resonate with viewers today, and demonstrate how the application of these insights can help health care professionals more fully understand morally distressing events and, as a result, support and improve the safety of patients.

Heroism and nursing: A thematic review of the literature

OBJECTIVES

Nursing history is replete with examples of heroic individuals acting courageously to meet the needs of vulnerable patients and communities. Heroism exemplifies the pinnacle of self-actualised behaviour. It fuels the plots of countless human stories, and enthrals and inspires people. Yet, heroism may be seen as an extreme behaviour that only exceptional individuals are capable of enacting, and may thus be seen as out of reach for ordinary nurses, and something that could be risky to teach and disseminate. An alternative view is that altruistic professions such as nursing are often regarded as being heroic by nature, and that nurses therefore need to be encouraged to understand, deepen and exercise their potential through a recognition of acts of heroism in nursing - whether these can be classed as exceptional or everyday acts of nursing heroism. The purpose of this article is to provide a thematic review of the literature on heroism in nursing, in order to understand how recent research in heroism science is being, or could be, applied to the nursing discipline. Heroism science is an emerging research area that is of interest to nursing leaders, educators and all those seeking to advance the social change agenda in healthcare.

REVIEW METHODS

A literature review was undertaken in 2017 using CINAHL, PUBMED, Cochrane, Medline, and Google Scholar. The search was limited to papers that were peer reviewed, in English, and published in the last ten years.

RESULTS

Four books and 33 papers were identified.

CONCLUSION

Gaining a clear understanding of what constitutes a hero and heroism is essential to applying heroism to nursing and to education of students so they are inspired to act courageously.

Tainted love: Gothic imaging of nurses in popular culture

AIMS

To discuss representations of nursing in popular culture using the Contemporary Gothic theory.

BACKGROUND

Nursing is stereotypically known as a caring profession. Caring in both the natural and professional perspectives is inextricably attached to love and love, we are told, is universal. In popular culture, however, there are numerous examples of nurses being portrayed in ways where love-its expression and its practice-has been transgressed or tainted. Exploring this dark side of nursing, even if fictitious, is significant because it illuminates social and cultural tensions.

DESIGN

Discussion paper.

DATA SOURCES

CINAHL, Scopus and Humanities International Databases were searched for terms related to nursing, love, abject and the gothic, published between 1990-2016. Four popular culture texts which ranged in genre and gothic elements were selected for analysis.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING

The types of transgressive love these nurses express to patients ranges from the obsessive and the pornographic, to the monstrous. We suggest this positioning illuminates a hidden reality that nursing work is at once intimate and personal but also hidden, profane, repellent, horrifying and feared. Nursing's allure for storytellers may rest in its association with the abject. How nurses find redemption, satisfaction and meaning in these locations is relevant for how we can imbue our lives and work with greater humanity.

CONCLUSION

The Contemporary Gothic is a useful tool in exposing and exploring ambiguous, challenging and taboo aspects of nursing in society. Such and analysis helps to explain phenomena-including nursing itself-which exists in the shadow of dominant and often stereotyped discourses.

'Pre-Run, Re-Run': An innovative research capacity building exercise

Within higher education it is ironic that experienced and novice researchers rarely take the opportunity to come together to share their research - whether these be to discuss findings, puzzles or developing projects. Within this paper, an innovative strategy building on these assumptions is described. It is entitled: 'Pre-run, Re-run' and is a learning community where specific processes are modelled by all to help build professional communication, collegial respect, and scholarship. Our evaluation showed that there is value in bringing together researchers especially when they have diverse profiles. Also, mixing experience with naivety, by inviting professors and junior staff to fraternize equally, offers the possibility for wide ranging discussion, as well as sharing a range of successful techniques, knowledge of the big picture and ways around obstacles that would otherwise be off-putting for novices. The less experienced perspective can equally be revitalizing because newcomers to scholarship often bring a fresh focus and enthusiasm and energy for practice. While this was a local innovation, which may not be generalizable to all settings, others hoping to bring together disciplines may benefit from utilizing the successful methods to build a productive, mixed research culture.

Moving Beyond Routines in Teaching and Learning: Releasing the Educative Potential of Published Eating Disorder Memoirs

Learning from the lived experience of disordered eating is vital for contemporary mental health practitioners. While mental health practitioners need to understand the psycho-biological issues that impact the person and family with an eating disorder, there is much about this complex condition that eludes and escapes a bio-medical perspective. Use of an aesthetic lens on the issue can illuminate various challenges, tensions and insights that people with disordered eating experience along the journey of their ill-health and on to their recovery, but which often remain unstated in the clinical context. Scholars within the creative arts discipline are experts in making judgements about the quality of artworks they encounter and have highly developed aesthetic knowing. Yet, the central skills and knowledges embodied in creative arts activity are not widely utilized outside that sphere. This article reports on how aesthetics can be applied to sensitize mental health practitioners to appreciate the lived experience of a mental health challenge such as an eating disorder. Such mental health practitioners play an important role in the health service, yet the widespread diffusion of the bio-medical model into mental health, once characterized for its equal emphasis on the psycho-social-cultural, has led to criticisms of an over-focus on illness identification, at the expense of accommodating the meanings of subjective and unique experiences of mental health, struggle and recovery. Using Kate Grenville's typology of the elements of effective creative writing, we show how these elements contribute to the aesthetic power and impact of particular eating disorder memoirs.

The Courage to Care-An innovative arts-based event to engage students and the local community to reflect on Australian nurses' roles in the First World War and after

There is a large body of work that documents the history of the nursing profession and the experiences of nurses during significant historical eras such as the First World War. Yet learning about nursing history is commonly a tiny, or absent, component in the undergraduate nursing curriculum. This paper discusses an innovative project that had multiple aims. A primary aim was to engage nursing students and educators in a project that valued nursing history by integrating it into an event to celebrate International Nurses Day. As the paper will explain, other aims were in organising the event so that it capitalised on particular creative arts strengths within the faculty, offering cross-disciplinary connections, engagement and appreciation. A Readers' Theatre event, involving academics and students in nursing, creative arts and education, was conceived, developed and performed for the community. The theme was the experiences of First World War nurses and how they encapsulated values important to nursing today - the 6 Cs - which guide high standards of nursing. The 6 Cs are care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment. We called the Readers' Theatre "The Courage to Care", and this involved a 4month process of script development, event planning and a performance. This process and outcomes were evaluated, prompting a reflection on the strengths and challenges of working in this creative way to engage a wide group of stakeholders to advance the profession of nursing.

Exploring the diary as a recovery-oriented therapeutic tool

Diary writing is a centuries-old method of recording events, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that might offer potential as a tool that consumers and nurses could utilize in recovery-oriented practice. While the diary has been used within health disciplines to detail and communicate personal experiences to enable collaborative examination of progress, a diary can also provide a more complete picture of what life is like; not only within the confines of a health service environment, but also outside. In recent times, the diary appears to be experiencing a renewed interest in terms of health care. People experiencing a mental health challenge might use diary-based forms of communication to promote understanding between themselves and mental health workers, and ultimately the use of this form of narrative therapy might facilitate person-centred, recovery-based actions. The present study paper, therefore, explores multiple perspectives on the use of diaries in the therapeutic context. Suggesting that diaries have not yet been utilized to their fullest potential by and with consumers and clinicians, this discussion raises issues and offers clarity about diary forms and their uses in the health context. It also discusses the barriers to their use and how to engage consumers and clinicians in recovery-oriented work.

Things you can learn from books: exploring the therapeutic potential of eating disorder memoirs

This paper explores the potential benefits that books, and specifically memoirs, might offer mental health students, positing that first-person testimonials might make the complex experiences of a mental health challenge, in this case, eating disorders, accessible to learners. The paper presents a pedagogical approach, based on transformative learning, to assist in encouraging the development of a recovery approach in students. Transformative learning is a pedagogy that is interested in problematic practices that keep afflicting an area, such as the imbalanced focus on learning illness, rather than well-being, and in pondering and revising the educational solutions. The paper proposes that forward movement in this area will be based on considering and developing such innovative curricula, and researching its impact. By virtue of their accessibility, memoirs could offer to a large audience the benefits of universality, empathy, hope, and guidance. Teachers and learners could be making use of these books in face-to-face or online activities. This paper explores the groundwork that is needed before eating disorder memoirs can be confidently recommended as a therapeutic tool.

Acute sensitivity of landslide rates to initial soil porosity

Some landslides move imperceptibly downslope, whereas others accelerate catastrophically. Experimental landslides triggered by rising pore water pressure moved at sharply contrasting rates due to small differences in initial porosity. Wet sandy soil with porosity of about 0.5 contracted during slope failure, partially liquefied, and accelerated within 1 second to speeds over 1 meter per second. The same soil with porosity of about 0.4 dilated during failure and slipped episodically at rates averaging 0.002 meter per second. Repeated slip episodes were induced by gradually rising pore water pressure and were arrested by pore dilation and attendant pore pressure decline.