Dementia Care, Nurse Education and Nurse Well-being: An Auto-ethnographic Critical Analysis and Review

Jenkins, Catharine (2021) Dementia Care, Nurse Education and Nurse Well-being: An Auto-ethnographic Critical Analysis and Review. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.

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Abstract

This auto-ethnographic critical analysis and review provides an account of my development as a researcher in the field of dementia care nursing and nurse education. The included peer reviewed publications have been chosen to illustrate my research skills and unique contributions to nursing knowledge and education. My clinical nursing experience was in transcultural dementia care and included studies reflect my ongoing commitment to this field. Some of the included papers were written for practice journals to promote application of theory to practice for nurses in clinical practice.

I chose an auto-ethnographic approach to writing this review with the intention of producing an engaging and meaningful account which would enable me to convey the significance and impact of my professional development as a researcher to best effect. This reflective, subjective approach to writing aligns with the qualitative nature of my research.

My research has addressed four key themes: i) Identifying nurses’ or service users’ experiences and needs, ii) Extending and sharing knowledge of dementia care, for nurse education, iii) Exploring what works in educational interventions for nurses and allied health professionals and investigating factors that sustain practice change and iv) Evaluating interventions designed to support nurse well-being. Early studies explore nurses’ learning needs, then building on this to how nurses can best learn about dementia care and from there to acknowledge that nurses’ own well-being is key to the provision of high standards of care, and exploring how this might be achieved in education and practice.

Contributing to the evidence and values that empower nurses within the hierarchical culture of healthcare has become a thread that runs through my practice, teaching and research.

My contributions to knowledge lie in new understandings of how cultural factors influence application of theory to practice in dementia care nursing and in identifying the profession’s related ethical responsibility for members’ well-being. Current understandings of Kitwood’s (1997) personhood theory (Kitwood and Brooker 2019) continue to prioritise the well-being of people with dementia while ignoring the costs to their professional care providers. My distinctive contribution here is to identify how the personhood of nurses working in dementia care is systematically denied, a cost which is detrimental to their well-being and therefore important for its own sake, but which has significant relevance too for the subsequent impact on quality of care, staff turnover, burnout and nurse retention. Barriers to application of theory to practice in dementia care may lie in insufficient application of theory, in that the theoretical constructs should be applied with nurses as we expect for patients. Adjusting future training programmes accordingly could impact on nurses’ professional self-esteem, job satisfaction, retention and their ability to apply learning in practice.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Dates:
DateEvent
4 May 2021Submitted
1 December 2021Accepted
Uncontrolled Keywords: Dementia care, nurse education, transcultural nursing, qualitative research, ethics in healthcare, nursing culture, autoethnography
Subjects: CAH02 - subjects allied to medicine > CAH02-04 - nursing and midwifery > CAH02-04-01 - nursing (non-specific)
CAH02 - subjects allied to medicine > CAH02-04 - nursing and midwifery > CAH02-04-02 - adult nursing
CAH02 - subjects allied to medicine > CAH02-04 - nursing and midwifery > CAH02-04-03 - community nursing
CAH02 - subjects allied to medicine > CAH02-04 - nursing and midwifery > CAH02-04-07 - mental health nursing
CAH02 - subjects allied to medicine > CAH02-04 - nursing and midwifery > CAH02-04-09 - others in nursing
Divisions: Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection
Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences > School of Nursing and Midwifery
Depositing User: Jaycie Carter
Date Deposited: 17 Jun 2022 14:09
Last Modified: 17 Jun 2022 14:09
URI: https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/13315

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