Melissa Corbally

Accounting for Intimate Partner Violence: A Biographical Analysis of Narrative Strategies Used by Men Experiencing IPV From Their Female Partners

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious social issue which affects the medium- and long-term health outcomes of many individuals worldwide. The cost of IPV on the physical and psychological well-being of individuals, in addition to its wider economic costs in responding to abused persons, is significant. Presently, there is a lack of understanding about the nature of female-initiated IPV and how men account for their experiences of it. This study examined male victims’ life stories of their IPV experiences from their intimate partners. Using the biographical narrative interpretive method, three cases were analyzed from a social constructionist perspective to examine what narrative strategies men used to account for their experiences of being abused by their female partners. Three dominant narrative strategies were used by respondents: the fatherhood narrative, the good husband narrative, and the abuse narrative. The abuse narrative had a unique narrative form, which reflected respondents’ disassociation between their identities as men and also as abused persons. Dominant conflicting discourses of masculinity and intimate partner abuse disadvantaged men in identifying IPV and secondly in responding appropriately. This study found that men prefer to use dominant discursive identities as legitimate means from which to disclose IPV experiences. The findings from this study illustrate that broad questioning by professionals regarding fatherhood may be most helpful in promoting disclosures of IPV if this is suspected.

Narrative competence: A neglected area in undergraduate curricula.

According to many inter-disciplinary scholars, including, notably, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jerome Bruner, human action draws on and is shaped by available cultural narratives. Nursing is no exception to this fact, and it is this which has prompted the creation of this paper which argues that the development of narrative competence in nursing ought to be a pressing curricular imperative. At a broad level, narrative competence refers to a finessed, ethically-charged respect for human lived and storied experience. At the level of professional development, it demands that nurses must constantly strive to improve on their abilities around attending, interpreting and intelligently responding to the stories of people in their care (Charon 2007, Bach and Grant, 2015). Doing so facilitates empathic and trustworthy practice through sensitive attunement to existential qualities such as inner hurt, despair, hope, grief, and moral pain. All of these qualities accompany the health problems that patients and clients experience, and are of course more fundamentally inscribed within the human condition.

Transition to blended learning: experiences from the first year of our blended learning Bachelor of Nursing Studies programme

Background: The School of Nursing at Dublin City University offered a new blended learning Bachelor of Nursing Studies programme in the academic year 2011. Aim: To document the experiences of the academic team making the transition from a face-to-face classroom-delivered programme to the new blended learning format. Method: Academics who delivered the programme were asked to describe their experiences of developing the new programme via two focus groups. Results: Five dominant themes were identified: Staff Readiness; Student Readiness; Programme Delivery and Student Engagement; Assessment of Module Learning Outcomes and Feedback; and Reflecting on the First Year and Thinking of the Future. Face-to-face tutorials were identified as very important to both academics and students. Reservations about whether migrating the programme to an online format encouraged students to engage in additional practices of plagiarism were expressed by some. Student ability/readiness to engage with technology-enhanced learning was an important determinant of their own success academically. Discussion: In the field of nursing blended learning is a relatively new and emerging field which will require huge cultural shifts for staff and students alike.

ICNP® R&D Centre Ireland: Defining Requirements for an Intersectoral Digital Landscape

The apparent speed and impact of creating a global digital landscape for health and social care tells us that the health workforce is playing catch-up with eHealth national programmes. Locating how and where the profession of nursing fits with future models of health service delivery is critical to provide focused engagement for the populations they serve. In 2016, Dublin City University (DCU) School of Nursing and Human Sciences (SNHS) created a research and development centre for International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®) in Ireland. This paper provides a summary of the first year of the centre’s research, describing how the initial activities link to the development of global eHealth policy. A key aspect of service delivery relates to defining care requirements, specifically to support sustainable intersectoral healthcare. Considering how nursing-sensitive language (clinical terminology) is best mapped is necessary to articulate the care requirements and processes to achieve optimal patient outcome. The World Health Organisational Framework for Integrated Care provides a pathway for crystallising the steep learning curve that the profession has currently found itself situated in, to deliver on contemporary digital healthcare.