Abstract

This research adopts a phenomenological approach to investigate how registered nurses think and experience nursing. Findings from the study highlighted the dynamic nature of how nurses think and experience nursing. This dynamic nature demonstrates the often vulnerable and stressed position nurses find themselves in today when trying to meet their professional aspirations within a medically dominated, bureaucratic health-care system. The findings suggest that not only is educational reform required, but nurses need skills to enable them to form change strategies so that their paradigm of health care can be established. This study represents the very beginning of trying to create that paradigm inductively.