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Journal of Nursing and Health Studies
ISSN: 2574-2825
April 23-25, 2018
Rome, Italy
Nursing Education 2018
Page 36
27th Edition of World Congress on
Nursing Education &
Research
Introduction: Critical care nursing in South Africa experiences
a crisis. Nurse leaders, managers and the public opinion reveal
poor standards of nursing care, which is confirmed by headlines
in the media. At the heart of these challenges and plaguing
health care services lays the disengagement of nurses from their
work and workplace cultures.
Objective: Reflecting on the crisis in critical care nursing,
academics from the Department of Nursing Science, University
of Pretoria, envisioned facilitation of change through practice
development. Practice development is a continuous process
which has the intent to address existing workplace cultures and
bring about change towards the development of person-centred
cultures. The process is enabled by facilitators. A three year
practice development programme was initiated in September
2013. The first objective was to explore the current workplace
cultures in selected public and private critical care units in
Gauteng.
Methods: Practice development as a methodology was used to
observe the workplace culture through utilising the Workplace
Culture Critical Analysis Tool. A total of 230 hours of observation
in 11 critical care units (six public and four private) was done.
The observation was conducted by internal (critical care nurses)
and external (academia) observers in four phases. The phases
included pre-observation, observation, consiousness raising and
problematisation, reflection and critique. The data was analysed
using a creative hermeneutic data analysis method.
Results: The “Big 7” challenges relating to workplace culture in
critical care practice were identified, namely: care and caring,
communication, therapeutic environment, team effectiveness,
learning environment, time management and professionalism
(not in order of priority).
Conclusion: Using practice development as a methodology
allowed critical care nurses to collaborate with academia and
participate in data collection and analysis. Participating with the
critical care nurses provided themwith an opportunity to observe
their practice, raise awareness for taken-for-granted practices
and reflect on these practices. Stepping outside their usual role
of doing and getting inside the prevailing workplace culture
provided the first step for taking action and addressing change.
Biography
Prof T Heyns is a senior lecturer at University of Pretoria for past 19 years
involved in the education and training of pre-graduate and post-graduate
students. Her area of clinical expertise is Emergemcy Nursing Care. She
has supervised post-graduate scholars to completion a total of 41Masters
and 3 PhD students.. Currently she is supervising 11 Masters and 10 PhD
students. She is an external examiner at several national and international
universities, has examined 25 Masters dissertations and 9 PhD thesis. She
has presented at various National and International Conferences relating
Trauma and Emergency care aswell as Practice development in the Critical
Care environment. She has 20 published article in National and Internation-
al Journals and is a lead researcher in an International Practice develop-
ment research project with NRF Funding. She is a Fellow of the Academia
of Nursing in South Africa (FANSA), as well as the past president of the
Emergency Nursing Society of South Africa.
Making workplace culture in critical care
visible: the “Big 7”
Tanya Heyns
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Tanya Heyns, J Nurs Health Stud 2018, Volume 3
DOI: 10.21767/2574-2825-C1-001