THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF CREATIVITY IN NURSING PRACTICE.

Description

Today' s society and today's health care are changing more rapidly than at any other time in history. The proliferation of new theories, new inventions, and new technologies compels nurses to face situations unlike any they have experienced before and requires them to be more flexible, more adaptive, and more creative. Creativity, however, has not been seen as a professional attribute of women in general and nurses in particular. Since individuals who can accurately perceive themselves as creative can be expected to behave in creative ways, the intent of this study was to uncover the essence of creativity as it is immediately given in nursing practice. Van Kaam's phenomenological method was used for this research. This method presupposes that experience with all its phenomena is basically the same in various subjects and assumes that one can reveal its essential structure through qualitative description. A nominated sample of female registered nurses who were identified as creative by other nurses and who were involved in direct patient care participated in a series of semi-structured interviews. During these interviews they were asked to describe a situation in their practice in which they felt particularly creative and to share all their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions about the experience. The data from these interviews was analyzed to determine the recurring themes that emerged from the descriptions. These themes formed the initial categories which were then reduced to obtain the necessary and sufficient constituents of the lived experience of creativity in nursing practice. Expert judges were used to validate the themes and necessary constituents. A structural definition composed of the necessary constituents and reflecting the essential structure of the lived experience was then formulated. For the participants in this study the essential structure of creativity in nursing practice was connection making which generated the energizing force needed to break the boundaries of established custom in an effort to meet patient needs. Knowledge from this study may help other nurses to recognize their own experience with creativity in practice. It may stimulate their use of this creativity as they engage in both the art and science of nursing.

Subjects