Paper
Saturday, July 24, 2004
This presentation is part of : Transforming Nursing Care Delivery in Long-Term Care (LTC): Integrating Evidence With Experience
Changing a Nursing Home Culture Through Narrative: Articulating Experience and Clinical Wisdom in EBN
Mary Louise Fleming, RN, MSN, Mozettia Henley, RN, DNS, and Anne M. Hughes, RN, MN, FAAN. Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center/San Francisco Department of Public Health, San Francisco, CA, USA
Storytelling is a way of sharing experience, success and disappointment. Through this form of narrative we pass on our values of what matters. With the growing emphasis on empirical evidence to guide practice, the role of experience and expertise needs to be clearly understood. Sigma Theta Tau’s position statement notes that evidence-based nursing integrates empirical evidence, nursing expertise and the values and preferences of patients, families and communities (accessed at www.nursingsociety.org).

Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center has a long tradition of providing chronic and long term care to San Francisco residents who require skilled services. The institution, part of the public health safety net system, serves the city’s diverse, multicultural and often disadvantaged elderly and disabled population. As the organization has focused on developing an evidenced based philosophy, we have begun to look closely at articulating experienced based practice as an important underpinning of care in this setting.

Dr. Patricia Benner, internationally renown and the author of From Novice to Expert, consulted with the organization’s leadership to create an opportunity for nursing staff, both licensed and nursing assistants, to share their practice stories during a Festival of Stories. Dr. Benner led the three-day experience in which over 150 staff participated. The Festival of Stories used phenomenological and ethnographic approaches to enter the staff’s disclosive space while they shared their experience and revealed their clinical wisdom through their stories of caring. The Festival also helped staff to clarify clinical goals and values, provided recognition of each individual as a valued caregiver and revealed exemplary nursing practice. These narrative exemplars shed light on actual practice as well as the essence of practice in this setting. They continue to inform educational and administrative programs that shape and improve the quality of practice.

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Sigma Theta Tau International
July 22-24, 2004