Background: The practice of nursing is shaped partly by nurses’ professional perspective of good care, guided by a nursing framework. An example is the framework of preservative care, which defines good nursing care for vulnerable older people in nursing homes. Currently we lack an understanding of how this framework could help nurses in training; it may be a useful developmental aid for undergraduate nursing students but so far there are no empirical data to support this.

Aim: The purpose of this study is to explore how helpful a particular framework can be in the learning journey of two undergraduate nursing students. The study draws on narrative and reflective accounts, guided by the question: ‘How does preservative care as a framework of good care help two undergraduate nursing students develop their caring for older people?’

Methods: This was a reflective case study, in which two students – experienced registered nurses (non-graduates) following a part-time education programme – reflected on their practices, using preservative care as a framework for taking care of older people. They kept reflective journals and received constructive feedback from the author of the preservative care framework (the first author). Their data were analysed in three steps.

Findings: Both students reported gaining profound help from the framework in their evaluations of daily practices, although they rated the help differently in terms of demanding and rewarding experiences. The framework was particularly helpful in developing qualities in three domains: person-centredness, professional role and specific nursing competencies.

Conclusions: The results of our study indicate how using a particular nursing framework made a difference to the practice of two undergraduate nursing students. Exploring the meaning and place of particular nursing frameworks in nursing education is necessary to establish their potential benefits for students.

Implications for practice:

• Further development is needed of reflective tools to highlight specific dimensions of nursing practice and support transformation of students’ learning and practice
• Nursing lecturers could determine how dominant a role a nursing framework should play in lesson content and how this would contribute to the current requirements that care recipients, care providers and health organisations have of good care

https://doi.org/10.19043/ipdj.52.006

This article by Jan S. Jukema, Netty van Veelen and Rinda Vonk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.