THE FIRST YEAR AS A STAFF NURSE - THE EXPERIENCES OF A FIRST COHORT OF PROJECT 2000 NURSES IN A DEMONSTRATION DISTRICT

This paper describes the experiences of eight staff nurses who were st udents in the first cohort of a Project 2000 course in a pilot distric t during their post-qualification year, A qualitative approach, inform ed by phenomenological methodology, was adopted in order to present th ese experiences alongside the meaning attributed to them by the nurses . Taped, focused group discussions, using semi-structured interviews, were analysed. This yielded five themes which describe the structure o f these experiences from 'coming out of school' through to the acknowl edgement and confidence in themselves as a different kind of nurse to those trained on previous traditional courses. The findings suggest th at the vision of the United Kingdom Central Council in proposing Proje ct 2000 courses is likely to be realized. These nurses had gained the competent technical and clinical skills expected of any nurse. However , they also displayed skills previously absent in newly-qualified nurs es, such as evidence of analytical decision-making and confident inter personal skills, which are likely to enable them to take an equal plac e amongst other members of the multi-professional team in the future. Although competent practitioners, the process they had undergone to re ach this had, at times, been traumatic. The implications arising from the study are that more attention needs to be paid to the personal and professional development needs of Project 2000 nurses, both at the en d of the course and in their first post-qualifying year.