Reframing Emotional Intelligence as Emotional Wisdom: This research has investigated the motif of emotional wisdom (EW) within a group of female nursing students in one United Kingdom (UK) University, through my perspective as a nurse educator. The provision of effective quality nursing care according to the DOH, (2012) Compassion in Practice policy document identified six fundamental values of nursing: care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment. Nursing practice is predicated on the presence of nurse education that is directed towards developing a safe and competent practitioner. Henderson (2001) and De Lambert (1998) have stated that nursing practice cannot be separated from the affective state of the nurse carrying out nursing care. The nursing literature suggests that EI has a role to play in nurse education, (Cadman & Brewer, 2001, McQueen, 2004, Freshwater & Stickley 2004), a role that is possibly underplayed. Using a qualitative research methodology grounded on a partnership based heuristic, [which is an adaptation of Moutakas’s (1990) methodology]; the study seeks to understand the lived experience of emotional intelligence (EI) of both myself as a nurse educator and those of nursing students. It suggests that a more meaningful way to apply EI within the context of learning and developing as nurses is as emotional wisdom (EW). Aim: to explore the lived experience of EI amongst a group of student nurses Method: a qualitative exploration drawing on Moustakas (1990), which holds the experiences of myself as the researcher, alongside the experiences of a group of nursing students as central to understanding what it is like to be an emotionally intelligent nurse. Findings: the data analysis uncovered four main themes relating to the lived experience of EI among us as a research group: Confronting the Nemesis of Kinsfolk Legacy. This focused on the impact of past emotional events in the development of the study participant in shaping her current emotionally intelligent identity Apprehending the Affective Learning Spaces. This theme explored the learning of emotions and emotional management of self and patients within the ‘classroom’ and the clinical setting pointing to a learning gap between those domains, which was rooted in a lack of emotional preparedness in the university. Authenticity of Being: Occupying Two Worlds. This explored the two domains in which the neophyte nurse found herself coming to an understanding and negotiated role clarity as to whom she was whilst learning as a nurse student and who she was as a daughter, mother, partner. Being Fully Present. This theme explored the data around the experience of learning to be emotionally attuned, or attentive to the patient. These findings are discussed within a creative synthesis and a summary of learning from the study. This seeks to proffer a potential model through which emotionally wise learning might be mediated within nurse education to future nursing students. In presenting such however, I am also offering up these findings with an invitation to you as the reader to determine if your own experiences find resonance with these accounts. Possible implications of the study within the field of nurse education: • Discussion concerning the use of EI measures as an additional recruitment marker to nurse education programmes • A pedagogical approach to nurse education predicated on an EW curricula • Recognition of an ontological oriented curricula in nurse education as a means to enhancing self-awareness.

This study investigates all graduate entry to nursing in England, focusing on the perceptions and experiences of nursing students and health professional educators at one English university. It presents a history of nurse education, debates the cases for and against the move to an all graduate entry, and introduces a conceptual framework based on the influences on, and expected outcomes of, the undergraduate nursing student. The study adopts a single-embedded case study design. Data was collected between October 2012 and September 2014 using questionnaires and focus groups. Statistical analysis and thematic analysis (using the framework devised by Braun and Clarke, 2006) were undertaken on the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The undergraduate student nurses reflected a positive attitude towards nursing, seeing a therapeutic relationship and the values underpinning ‘compassion in practice’ as fundamental to the role of Registered Nurse (RN). They also demonstrated motivations that reflected these principles and, to some extent, recognised them in themselves. The importance of developing and demonstrating graduate attributes was acknowledged, but these were not seen to be as significant as the fundamental principles of what it means to be a nurse. The majority of health professional educators supported the move to an all graduate entry to nursing, with nurse educators being more in favour that their Allied Health Professional colleagues. There was also clear recognition that the role of the RN had changed and that RNs needed graduate attributes in order to manage the complexities of twenty-first century healthcare. Participants in this study saw the move to all graduate entry as welcome and necessary, although this view was not universal. Reasons students gave for pursuing a career in nursing reflected those identified in earlier studies. The students’ experiences in clinical practice were affected by the standards of care they observed, the quality of mentorship and by issues related to ‘belongingness’. The study highlights and contributes to the on-going debate surrounding the development of nursing as a profession, confirming that the ideals of altruism have not been lost in the development of academic processes and identity.

Aim and background: this study investigates faculty members’ perceptions of the impact of Impact of the leadership styles of nursing deans on the job satisfaction of faculty members working in nursing education in Oman. Nursing education in Oman currently is going through a major transformation, with the appointment of new deans, the introduction of an accreditation process, and the upgrading of the nursing diploma to a Bachelor’s degree program in all governmental nursing institutions. These reform require significant development work in a short period of time; various taskforces have been established with specific tasks such as curriculum restructure, improving the range and number of research activities, the merging of institutes, introducing new policies, and establishing a quality assurance approach. This reform programme demands effective leadership to lead faculty, build the vision and respond to a range of external demands. In Oman, there is a lack of research on the role of leadership in higher education and its importance to staff professional development and job satisfaction, which in turn reflects on the level of organizational performance. The significance of this study is that it explores the perceptions of both teaching staff and their deans in a comparable set of organizations to determine which leadership styles have the greatest potential to improve their organizations. This was an insider research project with the researcher being a nursing dean; however certain measures were taken to ensure validity and reliability of the study. Method and conclusion: The study involved 147 lecturers and 7 leaders from various nursing institutes in Oman. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires: the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss 1967) and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Avolio & Bass 2004). Qualitative data were analysed for recurring themes and coded accordingly. Coding categories were constructed from the concepts and themes that emerged during the interview process and from the review of the literature. The overall findings indicate that most faculty members are satisfied with the leadership style of their deans. The transformational leadership style emerged as the preferred style to ensure faculty satisfaction and maintain productivity levels in demanding times; however, the deans also used a transactional leadership style for specific tasks. Implications: Management roles in health care education are very demanding, thorough preparation is required for the dean’s role and its associated tasks in order to develop and sustain a transformational style. Work-related leadership training and skill-development workshops, mentoring, and survival skills workshops could provide new deans with much needed support. The research on transformational leadership provides a good starting point; however, we need to think of the next step. It is very clear that deans of nursing institutes need to adopt transformational-transactional leadership styles to overcome continuous challenges, satisfy the nursing faculty and boost organizational productivity. Hence, the role of the nursing dean in Oman has to be built on transformational leadership, with a focus on collaboration by adopting a distributive stance (distributed leadership) that focuses on learning.

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There are currently numerous concerns about the quality of pre-registration nurse training in the United Kingdom, particularly regarding the fifty per cent of that training spent in practice placement settings. If pre-registration nurse training is to be as effective as possible, it is essential to create practice placement learning environments where all student nurses are empowered to be caring, confident, competent and resilient, where students feel able to survive and thrive and, hence, where they can maximise their learning experiences. When undertaking nurse training in the United Kingdom every applicant has to decide which field of nursing they wish to enter – adult, mental health, child, or learning disability – the majority choosing adult nursing. The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the practice placement learning experiences’ of those students who had chosen the adult nursing field, with a view to improving those experiences. This qualitative study drew on interpretive description, narrative inquiry and used Framework as the basis for the data analysis and interpretation. The findings of this study suggest that in order to ensure that student nurses have the best possible practice placement learning experiences attention needs to be paid to the following areas: • The preparation of individual student nurses for their practice placements. • The selection and preparation of individual mentors for their mentorship role. • The design and development of humanistic and transformative pre-registration nursing and mentorship preparation curricula. • The development of effective practice placement learning environments, including consideration of how both students and mentors are supported and valued in those practice placement settings. This study proposes that if the practice placement learning experiences of student nurses are to be improved, changes are required at the professional and regulatory levels within nursing, at the practice placement-university level of nurse training and at the individual student nurse-mentor level. Such changes, however, must be underpinned by evidence and not based solely on expert opinion, political ideology, or economic expediency, as has so often been the case in the past.

This study critically explores how Bourdieu’s (1985; 1989) concept of social space impacts on the experiences of medical and nursing students in the primary care setting when non-formal work based learning (WBL) is used as a model for interprofessional education (IPE) (Moore, 2012). Current ways in which professionals conduct their relationships with each other are also examined and factors that impede collaboration are also explored using Bourdieu’s theory of social life (1979; 1985; 1989; 1992; 1996; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) as a theoretical lens. Bourdieu (1979) uses the concept of social space as a means of exploring power and hierarchical relationships arguing that social space influences relationships so that whilst groups of people can be located in the same physical space, they can remain socially distant (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In the United Kingdom (UK) different professions are now located together, within GP (General Practitioner) Practices, in the belief that it will enhance CP (DH, 2005; Hudson, 2007). However, there are a number of factors influencing how doctors and nurses work together and these include the powerful position of the doctor in relation to the nurse (for example: Coombs & Ersser, 2004; Davis, 2003; Fagin & Gaerlick, 2004, Malloy et al 2009, Vogwill & Reeves 2008). Therefore, students placed in this environment are likely to be immersed into practices where power relationships occur and supervised by those who are involved in them. As such it is likely that they learn the implicit, hierarchically influenced, rules of engagement that are practiced by their qualified counterparts (Collin et al., 2011). The study drew on critical ethnographic principles and took place in a city in the north of England. Participants were selected purposively and were comprised of the staff from three GP Practices, as well as medical and nursing students who were on or had recently completed a clinical placement at one of the three Practices. Data were collected predominantly through uni-professional focus groups alongside a selection of observations. Field notes were made at the time of the observations and a reflexive diary kept throughout. I transcribed the focus groups verbatim and uploaded them into NVIVO8 with analysis undertaken using template analysis (King, 2004). Whilst CP is now accepted as a fundamental part of contemporary health care (Barr et al., 2005; Dickinson & Sullivan, 2014) there is little clarity regarding either its meaning (Haddara & Lingard, 2013; Lingard et al., 2012) or of how it should be achieved (King et al., 2013) and could be the reason that measurements of its effectiveness are limited (Barr et al., 2005; Zwarenstein & Reeves, 2006). Exploration of CP within an emancipatory discourse ii however suggests a multitude of interplaying influences on how professions engage (Ansari et al. 2001; Haddara & Lingard, 2013). Indeed, findings from this study showed that whilst staff groups perceived CP to be positive, there remained a complex interplay of factors that impacted on how it occurred. In particular the dominant position of the doctor remained problematic influencing how, when and if it occurred. Physical space, elusiveness, communication methods, titles, language and tasks performed were all found to be significant in relation to the level and type of capital held and therefore the social space between professions. However, these were frequently masked by the physical space and distance between the staff groups. Bourdieu (1985; 1986) argues that the habitus of the individual is also influential in relation to social relationships as it is an inherent element of who a person is: influencing how they think as well as what they say and how they say it. The individuals’ habitus will ultimately manifest itself as a set of ‘tastes’ which shape their identity (Bourdieu, 1979) and how they engage with their environment (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The socialization of students into uni-professional practices resulted in their becoming indoctrinated into the epistemological norms of the profession to which they aspired: adopting similar tastes to their qualified counterparts. In this way the official criteria of WBL became lost in the unofficial criteria of social compliance to the hierarchical position held by their qualified counterparts (Billet, 2001a). The conclusions from this study argue that collaboration is complex and that greater recognition is required of those factors that impact on it: and in particular the power imbalance between doctors and nurses. Equally, current assumptions regarding students’ learning in this setting need also to recognize the complexities of CP, rather than simply relying on the experiences into which they are immersed to enable them to attain the goals of IPE and become ‘collaborative practice ready’ (WHO, 2010) at the point of qualification.

The primary aim of this longitudinal study was to evaluate the effect of an educational programme upon the attitudes of nursing students toward working with ill older people, with two main objectives: 1. To explore the contextual conditions necessary for the programme mechanisms to work, and 2. To investigate how these contextual conditions may influence the success of the programme mechanisms in changing attitudes. Critical realism provided the theoretical framework, which guided the study design, from inception through to data analysis. Katz’ (1960) functional approach to attitude change was used to develop the educational programme. The study was quasi-experimental, using an interrupted time-series design. The attitudes of two groups of nursing students were measured over a period of 20 months, prior to and after the educational programme. A questionnaire-based tool was used to measure attitudes, selected because of its acknowledgement of the importance of contextual factors when measuring the attitudes of nursing students toward the field of older person care. One group attended the educational programme, the other did not. The attitudes of the second group were measured at identical points, to provide data for comparison. The findings showed that the programme had no effect on the attitudes of nursing students toward working with ill older people, either immediately, or over time. Both existing and new mechanisms were identified, that appear to adversely affect the context in which nursing students learn about the practise of nursing, and make it difficult for students to experience the care of ill older people in a positive way. Detailed analysis showed that elements related to the clinical learning environment have a strong impact on students’ attitudes towards the care of ill older people; very often, this impact is negative. The reality of clinical practice, it appears, is highly influential on students’ attitudes toward working with this group. The critical realist conception of a stratified clinical learning environment was developed in this study, informed by the work of Brown (2009). Mechanisms related to the structures and people in the clinical learning environment were identified which if addressed locally, may be pivotal in improving the contexts in which nursing students learn about the nursing care of ill older people. The original contribution that this study makes relates to how nurse educators can begin to improve the attitudes of nursing students toward the nursing care of ill older people, by improving the contexts in which they learn, with reference to their mechanisms. In line with this study’s findings, developmental work should begin within the psychological stratum, with concurrent action in both the socio-cultural and curricular strata of the clinical learning environment, in order to provide more immediate improvements in students’ placement experiences. A number of recommendations were made that would begin this developmental process, and may result in negating the need for attitude change programmes, with the ultimate intention of improving the quality of care for ill older people.

Introduction: Difficulties persist in conceptualising spiritual needs and understanding their relationship to religious needs and wellbeing in healthcare and particularly in nursing education. This research was undertaken to explore approaches and challenges associated with this area in undergraduate nursing education in England. Methods/Methodology: Using a systematic approach, a literature review covering the period 1993-2017 was undertaken to explore potential issues and challenges reported. Applying case-study methodology, data were collected from three university nursing schools from different parts of England. Sources for data triangulation within schools included, curriculum review of undergraduate nursing courses, exploring the views of nursing educators through semi structured interviews and focus group studies with nursing students. Template analysis was used to identify themes in the data. Findings: Due to the module based curriculum, the integration of spirituality in nursing education appeared to be treated as a matter of personal choice and convenience rather than as an essential domain of teaching and learning practice in England. Owing to conceptual complexity, addressing religious needs was often considered to be synonymous with addressing spiritual care need. Factors were identified contributing to the difficulties in the issue of educating nurses in this area. These were: lack of clarity in curriculum documents; uncertainty as to how far nurses should address these issues and how far this was a specialist chaplaincy function; fear of being judged or rejected in a multicultural environment; and the dominance of disease-centred care. The participants voiced a desire for developing a shared understanding through developing a more explicit representation of spirituality in nursing education and the recognition of appropriate educational approaches in this area. Based on the findings of this study a learning framework is proposed; SOPHIE (Self-exploration through Ontological, Phenomenological, Humanistic, Ideological, and Existential expressions), to encourage self-awareness and reflexivity among nursing educators and students. SOPHIE aims to bring ontological authenticity and congruency to the forefront of nursing knowledge and practice. Conclusion: Constructing knowledge through ontological learning engagements among educators and students is essential to develop role clarity, authenticity and empowerment in understanding and addressing spiritual care needs. A multidisciplinary teaching approach integrating medical anthropology, humanistic psychology and existential phenomenology should be explored as a basis for an integrated nursing curriculum that could explore spirituality in its widest sense.

This study investigates the conceptions of information literacy held by student nurses on a BSc Nursing Studies course and asks whether the information skills sessions taught are successful from the students’ viewpoint. Additionally, it compares attitudes to, and use of information literacy within the artificial environment of the university and the ‘real world’ of the nurse as perceived by participants on their clinical and community placements. The inquiry introduces the concept of information literacy and charts its development before discussing it in relation to the changing context of nurse education and evidence-based practice. The research adopts the interpretive paradigm with phenomenography as its methodology. It uses focus groups and twenty-one individual interviews to obtain rich data from a purposive sample of students across the three years of the course. Such data were analysed to produce categories of description representing the collective experience of information literacy across the sample. The thesis questions whether learning to nurse effectively is best achieved through training along traditional lines, education, or a combination of both. For the latter it is imperative to find an appropriate balance between academic and clinical skills. The findings reveal a tension between the academic and clinical aspects of learning to be a nurse which some students struggle to resolve. The study concludes that while information literacy is perceived as part of a nurse’s professional role in supporting evidence-based practice, participant observations suggest that its use is context dependent and variable. The thesis recognizes that the adoption of evidence-based practice may depend on the presence or absence of particular personal and organisational barriers. Suggestions for further research include the relationship between academic and clinical learning, the importance and influence of informal learning, and the nature of the transition from student nurse to autonomous practitioner.