Nurse education today
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Nurse education today · Apr 1999
The development of empathy in students on a short, skills based counselling course: a pilot study.
This paper reports on a pilot study to measure the development of empathy in students on a short skills-based counselling course. Thirty-eight students from a total population of 56 produced mean empathy scores prior to and following the counselling training. The results indicate that changes in levels of student empathy occurred in all but one of the students with a wide variation in the degree of change. ⋯ Despite the arguments for attempting to develop empathy in students being robust, there may be some individuals who would argue that short skills-based counselling training does not enable empathic development in the students. Whilst the authors argue that there is a need to demystify counselling training, they in no way suggest that there is no need for lengthy, more intensive counselling training. There appears to be a case for having both forms of counselling training.
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Nurse education today · Jan 1999
ReviewPsychological care in nursing education and practice: a search for definition and dimensions.
Despite a wealth of literature from the medical and nursing arenas pointing to the significance of psychological care in illness, there appears to be little consensus on definition, description and dimensions of the concept. A literature review and analysis of textbook content was conducted to explore the nature of the concepts of psychological need and care which might inform nurse educationalists in the preparation of appropriate teaching and learning programmes. Preliminary findings indicate that there is little consensus upon definition or description and, with the exception of information-giving, upon the dimensions or components of psychological care, despite the fact that student nurses are prepared to meet the same nationally prescribed learning outcomes by pursuing broadly the same guidelines for educational content. It is suggested that this has particular implications for nursing lecturers with a responsibility for teaching the philosophy and practice of holistic care.
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Reflective practice aims to enhance client care via the professional development and growing expertise of practitioners. This paper offers practical guidelines for writing diaries that may form the basis for reflective practice, while acknowledging the skills that practitioners already use to examine their nursing actions and interactions. ⋯ While ideas presented have been influenced by the literature on reflection, the paper owes as much to the continuing education students of the Homerton School of Health Studies who studied the reflective practice module during 1996. Without listening to their discussions, becoming aware of their difficulties and sharing their growing ability to reflect on practice, this article would not have been possible.
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Nurse education today · Dec 1997
ReviewWriting ourselves: creating knowledge in a postmodern world.
In an attempt to encourage nurses and academics to write, there have been some recent journal papers that outline rules and guidelines for successful publication. This paper attempts to tackle the 'why' of writing rather than the 'how', and argues that writing is more than merely the representation of speech. Rather, writing is a creative act in which knowledge is produced as part of the process of writing itself, and at this level we might talk not merely of writing, but of writing. ⋯ We might, of course, choose to publish our writing, but it is done as an afterthought; we write for discovery, not for presentation. The act of writing is then compared to the act of teaching, and it is concluded that in order to teach, we must also write. Finally, this paper is offered as an example of writing (not an exemplar--there are as many ways to write as there are writers), and attempts to pull together material from a variety of sources including sociology, psychology, philosophy and literature as an act of discovery, of creating what I know about writing as I write.