Professional Experience Placement

This article by Corbally and Grant (2016) explores the issue of the development of the capacity of nurses to attend, interpret and intelligently responding to the stories of the people within their care.  The authors argue this ability needs to be overtly included in the undergraduate curricula. They believe that empathy and trustworthy practice through sensitive communication with patients / clients enables more patient-centred and therapeutic care to occur. The attainment of narrative competence needs educational preparation to enable students to learn how to understand, interpret and respond to the distress stories of people in their care.

The development of respectful interpretation is a core aspect of narrative competence.  The three techniques of representation; attention and affiliation that goes beyond active listening. These techniques can be addressed within educational programmes. The authors describe the importance of life stories and the capacity of nurses to transform people’s lives through deep respectful engagement and reflexive awareness that can be developed into professional artistry and competence. The authors acknowledge that inclusion into the curriculum could be challenging, however, the quality of nursing could be improved.  This paper also acknowledges that nurse educators and supervisors would need educational preparation to enable support of students to develop narrative competence.

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