Paradoxes and the undergraduate student nurse

Abstract

It seems that the nursing experience is very different from the university life and that inevitably this produces conflict and adjustment difficulties for degree course student nurses. “At college the whole aim of the course was to encourage individual and independent thinking. We came into nursing having been trained like this to find a great lack of it. The whole idea seems to be to catch girls young and train them into traditional ways of thought and practice unquestioningly. This seems largely what happens and although many nurses complain often about their training they seldom question the possibility of changing it or have any positive ideas about a better course. The same applies in the ward situation where they are very conscious of the hierarchy and seldom question an order from ‘above’ or the way a thing is done if it is always done like that.” The two types of institution enjoy differetnt philosophies, organisational structures, atmospheres and interpersonal relationships. It is felt by some students that the degree course “works against nursing” in encouraging “maturity and wider experience of life” so that they are “less narrow-minded” and have “broader horizons” than might otherwise be the case. “A degree and university life tends to make one unsatisfied with the routine and discipline of nursing and especially the medical hierarchy—though not lessening the satisfaction of the actual work with patients.” The undergraduate nurse may not always be able to adjust to the idea that she is perceived as “a hard worker in university and a layabout in hospital”; that she is allowed freedom of thought on the one hand and is required to do as he is told on the other; and that she may be accepted in one institution and resented in the other. Perhaps it is rather naive to see degree courses for nurses as a “different approach to nursing”. They are better seen as a very broad educational experience which demands participation in two vitally different cultures with different socialisation processes, norms and sanctions. It may be that learning to live in one results in alienation from the other, in which case to what extent is the idea of a graduate being able to use her full potential in nursing an impossible goal? “The general idea is that we should become better nurses by having had a university career and in this respect I think it is true— if after 3 yr (or whatever) at university the undergraduate still wants to nurse. The two lives are chalk and cheese.”