Dignity in the Work Lives of Clinical Nurses

This descriptive study examines how clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives. Nursing has embedded dignity, particularly the dignity of others, as a core professional value. However, while the practice of nursing is deeply concerned with the achievement of patient dignity, dignity as a self-regarding professional right is not well articulated. Hodson's (2001) model for dignity at work provided a lens through which to examine the relevant nursing literature. It was revealed that the dignity of nurses as an intrinsic human and worker right has received little explicit attention, and that the significance of this is possibly not sufficiently well understood. A qualitative descriptive approach was used to further investigate the area of nurse dignity. Seven nurses were recruited to participate in facilitated workshops to explore the research question, 'How do clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives'? The data were analysed using directed content analysis and presented as a descriptive summary. Dignity, for the participants, was strongly associated with the worth, value, and meaning that nurses attach to their profession, to the work that they do, and to themselves personally. This was shown to be central to their understanding, experience, and achievement of dignity in their work lives. Each encounter, each moment, was seen to be invested with the potential to maintain, affirm, erode or infringe personal dignity. The nurses perceived nursing to be a meaningful, worthwhile endeavour, but frequently struggled to extract a sense of dignity when working in environments that they perceived as not supporting their agenda of care. Being seen as a respected professional, enjoying daily positive interactions with colleagues and being successful in the act of nursing, had the strongest association with the ability to extract worth, value, and meaning from the work experience. The absence of a perception of the participants' need to regard managerial colleagues was an unexpected finding. It was concluded that dignity should be pursued as a right in any context including the work context of nurses, both as a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is suggested that the current dominant approach that interests itself in the needs of nurses primarily as a means to achieving health care outcomes for patients may be neglecting an important dimension. Future inquiry into the area of nurse dignity should begin from the premise that to understand the meaning that nurses attach to dignity, one first has to understand the meaning that nurses attach to nursing, and in particular the nature of the social compact that nursing holds with society.