Introduction

Nurses have an essential role in acute care situations for preventing adverse events and improve patient outcomes as they typically have most patient contact and are often first to detect acute sickness (Della Ratta, 2016). Education and experience is highlighted as important for developing nurses ability in acute situations (Massey et al., 2017). The aim of this study was to describe what affects novice nurses’ ability to care in acute situations.

Method: Qualitative descriptive design with a phenomenographic approach. Data consisted of 17 interviews of novice nurses working in acute care hospitals in Sweden. Novice are defined as less than 1 year of working experience. The context acute situations following Sterner et al. (2017) findings that acute situations is more than physical deterioration of patients.

Results: Experience of acute situations is perceived as significant for developing the pivotal knowledge and ability to care in acute situations. Clinical practice is not a guarantee for this experience during nurse education. Reasons for this could be that nothing acute happened during allocated shifts. If an acute situation occurred the student could be allocated additional assignments or sent home. The skills obtained in acute situations are perceived as a lottery dependent upon where you get your clinical practice assigned.

Discussion: Experience is perceived as significant for developing ability to care in acute situations. If nurse education can’t facilitate learning of and in acute situations during clinical practice, simulation can be a method for developing the ability. When nursing students train, it is important to include different factors such as time pressure, surprises, contact with different occupational groups and next of kin to facilitate the ability to care in acute situations.

References

DELLA RATTA, C. 2016. Challenging graduate nurses' transition: Care of the deteriorating

patient. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 25, 3036-3048.

MASSEY, D., CHABOYER, W. & ANDERSON, V. 2017. What factors influence ward nurses’ recognition of and response to patient deterioration? An integrative review of the literature.Nursing open, 4, 6-23.

STERNER, A., RAMSTRAND, N., NYSTRÖM, M., HAGIWARA, M. A. & PALMÉR, L. 2017. Novice nurses’ perceptions of acute situations–a phenomenographic study. International emergency nursing.