New Graduate Nurses’ Experiences of their Professional Readiness during Transition to Professional Roles.

Abstract

Abstract: Introduction: Transition, defined as passage from one life phase, condition, or status or another, has been the focus of attention as a central concept in nursing. The transition to staff nurse role at the completion of the educational program also has received a great deal of attention as a situational transition and nurse scholars have continuously emphasized it as an important phase in nursing career. Nevertheless, few researches have been carried out on this type of transition as well as the nurse's experiences during this transitional period. Understanding the nurses' experiences during transition to their professional roles can be used as a guide to develop appropriate educational and supportive strategies for new graduate nurses. So it is made possible to develop the nurses' professional values as well as their attitudes and necessary behaviors to achieve a favorable result, which is indeed the promotion of nursing care. Therefore, this study has been conducted to understand the mean professional role and seeks to answer the following questions: 1. What is the structure of transitional experience from student's to professional nurse role? 2. What are the constituents of this experience? 3. What is the constitutive pattern in this transitional experience? Methodology: This qualitative study is conducted as an interpretive phenomenological research on the basis of the Heidegger philosophy. For Heidegger, phenomenology is an interpretive method by which the researcher goes beyond mere description of what is manifest and tries to uncover hidden meanings. Heidegger a phenomenology attempts to understand the semantic and textual meanings of everyday life and recognizes that the being –in –the –world is the starting point for hermeneutic inquiry. Having begun their career in the main hospital of Sabzevar, 9 new graduate nurses were selected through purposeful sampling and interviewed by unstructured in depth interview. After initial data analysis and the emergence of primary codes, five more nurses from other cities including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad and Shiraz were interviewed too. All the interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Diekelmann and colleagues (1989) method of analysis was modeled for data analysis and interpretations. Results: Five main themes emerged from the analysis of the participants' experiences during transition to their professional role as a staff nurse, each consisting of a number of sub –themes. These themes and their sub –themes in parenthesis are professional readiness (competency, self –confidence, expectations), support (orientation, confusion, and emotional reactions), and interaction with the environment (colleagues' encounters, loneliness, compulsion, and adjustment), going native (work setting culture, routinization) and independence (responsibility, accountability). Conclusion: In general, the participants' experiences indicate that transition to the staff nurse in the nursing structure of Iran is a stressful experience accompanied with many challenges, mainly caused by the lack of a supportive practice environment and weaknesses in nursing curricula. Through describing the new graduate nurses' experiences on entering the new work setting, this study considerably contributes to the development of the body of knowledge about transition to the staff nurse role. Also, the suggestions which appear in the research applications can serve as an appropriate guide for the development of supportive and educational nursing programs for new graduate nurses and help them adjust with their new situation.