Editorial

We present six papers and a Perspective in this edition. The Perspective shares reflections of healthcare from birth to the current day and through that, surfaces what nursing means to one man, Steve, our Editorial Assistant. His insight is both profound and poignant. It is highly recommended, affirming, reading for any nurse, caught up in the sometimes-overwhelming demands of each day, where we all risk losing sight of our purpose and realising our impact.

The papers included in this edition may at first sight seem like a random collection but, as is our custom at JRN, we highlight in this editorial, the golden thread that connects and runs through them. The first two papers illustrate how specialist nursing knowledge empowers patients and families through building their confidence to manage their own condition and care. The first paper describes a qualitative approach used to surface the experiences of children living with asthma participating in everyday activities, and inform nursing and, more specifically, patient education in practice. The second paper presents a review of 12 studies examining the effects of educating patients and carers to self-manage peripherally inserted central catheters, known as PICC lines, used to administer cytotoxic and other drugs to patients receiving cancer treatments. The evidence reviewed strongly suggests that educating patients reduces the potential and the incidence for PICC line associated complications.

Whilst the first two papers focus directly on the actual and potential of nurses with evidence informed knowledge to empower patients to effectively self-care within two specific areas of nursing practice, the second two papers focus on empowering nurses with knowledge to inform their practice through education and support. The first of these papers sets out a protocol to evaluate specialist nursing education. The focus here is to empower undergraduate, pre-registration nursing students with the knowledge to care for people living with dementia, building their confidence through the process. The second paper in this duo explores the experience and the perceptions of student health visitors (training to be specialist public health nurses in the United Kingdom) recognising and responding to domestic abuse in practice placement settings. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, the researcher gained a better understanding of the knowledge and support these students required to identify and effectively work with all clients experiencing domestic abuse.

The final two papers in this edition stand back from direct patient care and focus on nurses themselves and their workplace contexts and cultures. The first paper describes a survey to explore the perceptions of 152 nurses of their clinical decision-making ability. It explores whether, and if so how, this related to their well-being. The study findings suggested a link between perceptions of clinical decision-making and experiences of moral distress. The research indicated that both the eating behaviours and the self-compassion of these nurses had a moderating role. The final paper in this edition is based on the premise that collaboration between nurses is crucial to improving quality in healthcare, and it plays a key role in increasing nurses’ job satisfaction. This premise was explored and compared using quantitative and qualitative methods in Turkey and Italy. The authors argue that their findings may be particularly useful to executive nurses – those with the power to create and maintain the conditions where nurse–nurse collaboration may flourish.

Enhancing the knowledge and impact of nursing is the golden thread running through all these papers. When we consider the first two papers, I would argue, we really should all, routinely, remind ourselves and share our experiences of where our nursing expertise has made a difference – whether we have empowered patients and others to mitigate risk, enhance their well-being or realise their potential. Equally, when we consider the second two papers, the lifelong education of nurses should always have enhancing nursing knowledge and impact as its primary focus. Capturing and sharing accounts of where nursing expertise has made a difference may be one way of enabling this. And finally, when we consider the last two papers in this edition, looking after ourselves and each other and working together effectively, clearly impacts on the quality of care we have the capacity to provide. Nurses need access to a healthy diet, exercise and self-compassion. I would add sleep in there too. For nurses to continually enhance their knowledge and their impact, those who lead and manage nurses and nursing services must share this common goal. By creating the conditions where both nurses and nursing flourishes, nurses, patients and communities can collectively identify and mitigate risk, enhance their well-being and realise their potential – in so doing, they demonstrate their value.