Facilitating transitions to relationally compassionate practitioners

Being in relation with “the other” (a patient, colleague) involves enacting an embodied
understanding of five relational capacities: commitment, curiosity, compassion, competence, and
corresponding (Doane and Varcoe, 2015). For nurses, this requires a shift from an epistemological
lens of knowing the content involved in enacting capacities to the ontological turn towards being
a practitioner that lives out the embodied relational capacities. The movement towards “being”
requires intentional activities that promote embodied experiences. The purpose of this
AMS/RNAO fellowship project is to provide nursing students, faculty, and/or preceptors with an
opportunity to discover their transformation into relationally compassionate practitioners
through creative self expression and reflective dialogue offered in a series of six sessions. These
sessions extend the work established through my ealier AMS/RNAO work.

The participants for the sessions will be recruited from those that participated in the workshop that discussed the relationship amongst relationality, moral obligations, person-centred care, and compassion. This transformative experience will be studied through a Narrative Inquiry lens. I attempt to understand how nursing students, faculty, and/or preceptors’ experience becoming and being relationally compassionate practitioners after immersion in the experience of the sessions. This project that highlights the core theme of self-identity, has the potential to inform the curriculum, faculty development, and preceptor workshops. It may also have wider implications to the teaching and learning of relational, person-centred, and compassionate practice at the point of care across Nipissing University’s nursing programs, other nursing undergraduate programs, and nursing practice.