A phenomenological research focused on head nurses skills

38^th International Conference on Nursing & Healthcare

October 16-18, 2017 | New York, USA

Roberta Silva & Luigina Mortari

University of Verona, Italy

Keynote: J Nurs Care

Abstract :

The debate about the essential skills for nursing skills is broad and their definition has changed considerably over the years. Anyway, in the last years, many scholars share the idea that a nurse must have four main group of skills: technical (or professional) skills, communication and interpersonal skills, decision-making skills and management and team working skills. By analogy, we can say that similar are the competencies that are needed by a Head Nurse, but few are the scholars that have specifically focused their attention on this professional profile. Starting from these considerations, our research wants to fill this gap asking to some Head Nurses, what are, according to their lived experiences, the key competences that they need to effectively act as Head Nurse? According to this aim, we choose to follow a qualitative approach, because it allows to build inductively â�?�?working theoriesâ�? able to describe a lived experience and more specifically, we choose phenomenological method because it is particularly suitable to explore the meanings that a practitioner gives to his or her experience. The tool of collecting data that seems to be more coherent with our aim and our methodological framework is the narrative interview because its being open-ended allows the subjects able to lead the interview, revealing what is significant for them, putting directly in touch with their meaning. The research team worked on the collected material to identify relevant units and to label them to agree on a shared version of the labelling process.

Biography :

Roberta Silva has received her PhD from the University of Verona (BA and MA at Milan University) and she had been engaged as Education Manager for Professional Pathways in the same University (Department of Human Science). She is currently a Research Assistant in Educational Research. Luigina Mortari is Dean of the Department of Human Sciences of the University of Verona. She is Full Professor in Epistemology of Qualitative Research. Her main research fields are: epistemology and qualitative methods in educational research, epistemology and qualitative methods in nursing research, the evaluative research in educational contexts, the practice of caring in educational settings.