What matters, and to whom? An exploration of New Graduate Nurses’ experiences of care and caring

Background: Current health related literature refers to ‘health care’, ‘health care services’ and, ‘health care professionals’ or disciplines all of whom have some claim to care and caring in their practices. Newly graduated registered nurses enter practice with a mix of excited anticipation of what lies ahead, aspirations for their futures and, anxiety about their capability and clinical competence. In Australia they can find themselves in arenas that vary from supportive and nurturing, to those that can be destructive.

Methods: Data was collected from newly graduated nurses using semi structured interviews, visual elicitation and participants’ creative artefacts. Hermeneutic analysis was guided by the work of van Manen (1990) to identify units of experience that formed broad themes.

Results: Caring practices are contextual, relational and sensitive to the humanness of others. Some participants in this research described feeling welcome, included and cared about. Others felt like they were being crucified, leading to attrition. The impacts of their experiences of care and caring from colleagues on their own caring practice suggest that turning our care and caring inward as a profession is essential to enabling the newest members of our profession to thrive in environments that value caring practice and caring science.

Conclusions: Care is a characteristic of being human that has social and professional meanings, expressed as responsiveness to circumstances from which different possibilities can emerge.

Ethical approvals: Human Research Ethics Approvals for this research were received from participants’ employing health services and Charles Sturt University. Participants were assigned female pseudonyms to maintain their confidentiality and privacy.