PERSEVERANCE - THE MEANING OF PATIENT EDUCATION IN PSYCHIATRIC NURSING

This phenomenological study was undertaken to discern the meaning psyc hiatric nurses attach to their patient education experiences. Although patient education crosses all nursing specialty areas, no studies hav e attempted to describe how it is unique to psychiatric nursing. Herme neutic analysis of audiotaped, semistructured, in-depth interviews rev ealed three themes, The Teaching Way, Being In-Between, and Seeing Ins ide, which, when taken together, formed one constitutive pattern: pers everance, The results indicate that psychiatric nurses are very much i nvolved in educating their patients and that the process differs from traditional expectations of learning readiness. There is also an appar ent need to educate students about the realities of health care settin gs and how to deal with them. The researcher, herself a psychiatric nu rse, came away from this study with a renewed respect for nurses' comm itment to patient education, for their ability to use themselves as th erapeutic tools, and for their ability to practice from within politic al settings which seldom encourage or reward nurses for patient educat ion. Further studies are needed to explore how nurses deal with the po litical realities affecting their practices and how they maintain thei r commitment to patient care under such circumstances. Copyright (C) 1 998 by W.B. Saunders Company.