This qualitative study explores the two year journey from healthcare assistant to assistant practitioner within an acute health care setting. With a paradigm shift in the NHS to organisational and workplace learning and the local introduction of the Assistant Practitioner role to support the nursing workforce there was a broad need to understand the context of the lived experiences of those who work and learn. Hermeneutic phenomenology was chosen as the most appropriate methodology for exploring the lived experience. A purposive sample of eight trainee assistant practitioners, four matrons, seven mentors and the practice development nurse participated in conversational interviews at intermittent points in the journey. A stepped process of analysis of interview text produced three over-arching super-ordinate themes which indicated that the transition to assistant practitioner is non-linear and complex necessitating a change in knowledge and behaviour and the workplace culture must enable learning and role development. These themes are illustrated with excerpts from the participants experience to collectively produce a description intended to facilitate understanding of my interpretation of data. Findings were illuminated by drawing on existing theoretical knowledge and concepts and imbued by reflections from the researcher's diary to elucidate the research process. This study has determined many different aspects of the experience of learning in the workplace. This experience has informed an emerging framework of the attributes, enabling factors and expected consequences for describing an effective journey. It identifies the common characteristics through which an effective journey is evident - the learner engages in mindful transformative learning experiences and manages the transition process through adjusting, adapting and accommodating to the new role, the learner and their mentor use the workplace as the main resource for learning and the workplace culture accommodates and learns from the development and implementation of new roles.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:690912 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Thurgate, Claire |
| Publisher | Canterbury Christ Church University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://create.canterbury.ac.uk/14703/ |
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