NURSING ACROSS BORDERS: PROMOTING COMPASSIONATE NURSING PRACTICE

Background:

Internationally, compassionate nursing practice has been both a professional expectation and an expectation of patients and their families of the type of person centred care they should receive. Recent failures in the provision of compassionate and competent nursing care, particularly for the most vulnerable of service users across a range of health care services in the UK has attracted governmental and professional concern and condemnation. Whilst compassion is often a complex and contested concept, achieving and being able to demonstrate compassionate care has become the focus for politicians, practitioners, and educationalists. In many parts of the world much of this focus has been on improving the recruitment of student nurses. Approaches have included introducing values based recruitment, increasing the educational entry requirements, and/ or on ensuring ‘compassion’ is ‘built into’ the pre-registration nurses curriculum. Less attention has been focused upon the socialisation of mental health nurse’s as they deal with the increasingly turbulent practice environment.

Objective:

This paper draws upon a number of case examples, in Europe, and Africa, underpinned by a review of the literature to explore the factors that contribute to the professional socialisation of nurses. The professional socialisation of nurses is the process by which individuals acquire the skills, knowledge and identity that characterise the profession of nursing. It involves a process of the internalisation of the values and norms of profession. How these factors can become embedded in educational practice is illustrated through the an educational approach adopted in a large School of Nursing in the North West of England (UK) that involved service users, carers, student and qualified nurses which aimed to facilitate greater understanding of the emotional labour of nursing practice so nurses might be better prepared for their practice.

Conclusion:

The term ‘prepared’ is used to encompass both the technical and theoretical knowledge required for informing practice and the attitudes, values, emotions that influence the mental health nurse in delivering person centred practice that has compassion at its core. In the context of ensuring compassionate nursing practice, these processes of socialisation suggest that compassion cannot be taught, but is perhaps better caught.