Life Stories of Mid-career Nurses who Moved in the Long-term Care Wards from the Acute Hospitals

Abstract

This study aims to describe to consider nursing practice use by mid-career nurses, in particular to focus and clarify using life story, once they move from acute hospital to long-term care wards. Subjects included three such female in their early 40s. Subjects were interviewed about their best and most difficult experiences, and experiences that became turning points since beginning work with long-term care wards. Their stories were analyzed focusing on temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic coherence . The subjects had 6-10 years of experience in acute hospitals and 3.5-8 years with long-term care wards. They gained a sense of competence through their nursing practice at acute hospitals but experienced conflict due to the incompatibility with their private lives accompanying events that followed their transfer to long-term care nursing. They could not practice nursing as before with the long-term care wards, and experienced shock and confusion regarding their identities as nurses. However, they understood nursing for long-term care wards based on their own practice cultivated through prior experience. Results showed that it was essential for nurses to maintain a sense of competence to continue work with long-term care wards and find meaning by connecting their current practice to previous experiences, than adapting to long- term care wards. Further, it is important to reconstruct one's nursing care from past experiences, when transferring to long-term wards care, a change which includes one's private life profession.