Nurses are key medical personnel who play a pivotal role in providing necessary medical services by the patient's side 24 hours a day. In the case of clinical nurses who take care of patients at the closest location, they have a higher physical and me...
Nurses are key medical personnel who play a pivotal role in providing necessary medical services by the patient's side 24 hours a day. In the case of clinical nurses who take care of patients at the closest location, they have a higher physical and mental stress index than other occupations due to their unique occupational characteristics such as accepting various demands, professional sense of mission, complex human relationships, emotional labor, and irregular work patterns, and their physical and mental health is affected by excessive work, which lowers their quality of life. This eventually leads to intention to change jobs and creates a vicious cycle in the nursing workforce. Therefore, this study was conducted with the purpose of understanding the essence of work-related experiences and personal life experiences inside and outside the nursing field while living as a clinical nurse in Korea, and deeply exploring the life experiences and meanings revealed in them. The subjects of this study were nurses who had various experiences and understanding of the role of nurses, had more than 2 years of clinical experience, and had sufficient experience as a nurse. Eight subjects from a specific hospital in Seoul participated in the study. After recruiting participants, a process of explaining the photovoice research method was conducted, and according to the presented topic, the participants took photos themselves and composed raw data based on the photos and their meanings, and focus group discussions. The collected data was analyzed using the thematic analysis method of
Braun and Clarke (2006). As a result of this study, the life experiences of clinical nurses in Korea were divided into 19 meaning units and 10 sub-themes, and were divided into four themes: ‘professional identity and internal conflict,’ ‘reward and vitality gained through work,’ ‘work-life balance and harmony,’ and ‘expectations for change and growth.’ First, professional identity and internal conflict were expressed as “where is my path, inner confusion and instability, hardship due to work, dedication and emotional distance,” and the clinical nurses expressed the meaning of being a nurse, showing negative aspects experienced in practice such as identity confusion and skepticism about the nursing profession due to excessive work, shift work, unresolved imbalance in personnel, and low social recognition. Second, the sense of reward and vitality gained through work was expressed as “the value of care, the driving force that enables me to endure”, expressing the heart for caring for patients and the positive energy gained from work with colleagues. Third, the balance and harmony of work and life was expressed as “efforts to achieve balance, interest in myself”, and fourth, the expectation of change and growth was expressed as “indispensable, hopeful”, indicating that nurses are an
irreplaceable profession as the main agent of care, and signifying changes and hopes for the domestic nursing environment. The experience of living as a clinical nurse means facing confusion and internal conflict in professional identity, but feeling reward and vitality through work, and achieving balance and harmony of work and life, and anticipating changes and growth in domestic nursing. Based on these results, this study is significant in that it can be used as basic data to provide appropriate alternatives for changes in domestic nursing by exploring the meaning and essence of the life experience of clinical nurses, thereby providing an opportunity to reflect on and develop roles and tasks in practice.