The role of reflective practices in enabling final year nursing students to respond to the distressing emotional challenges of nursing work

Drawing on the findings of a phenomenological study which sought to understand something more about the lived experience of final year nursing students of learning through reflective processes; this paper seeks to consider how engagement with reflective practices enabled the participants to manage the distressing emotional challenges and labour of nursing work. Choosing to pay attention to the affective domain appeared to enable the participants to better understand the complex nature of the emotional challenges of nursing work and what it meant to them personally to be a nurse. Some of the participants were proud to describe how reflective activity had enabled them to develop and justify a 'traditional' emotional detachment from their care, whilst others used the 'own knowing' developed through reflective activity to reject the notion of professional detachment and come to value a more embodied sense of care which inevitably led them to become entangled in the distress and suffering of their patients. This type of personal reflective learning may emphasise and value more humanising characteristics of care. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.