As a nursing student in the largest French-language faculty of nursing in the world, I have the privilege to rub shoulders with budding scholars from all over the world. Today, I’d like to publish a text written by my friend and colleague, Houssem Eddine Ben Ahmed. It is a timely piece that helps remind nurses of our social contract, a concept that can help anchor us in these politically charged times. He is a PhD student in nursing, passionate about the application of Caring. He believes Caring, embodied in a educated and competent nursing workforce, is a question for public health as well as nursing. Here is his piece on Caring and learning processes:

It’s with great pleasure that I send you my brief description about my own experience of professional caring in nursing education. I’m currently a PhD student in Canada, but I was born and raised in Tunisia, where I also entered the academic world. Nursing education is quite different there, and graduate programs are not yet available for nurses. Consequently, I did my Master’s degree in Public Health, where I was able to bridge my nursing knowledge to broader issues. This is what led me to pursue doctoral studies where I could explore the relationship between nursing students and their educators.

 I have learnt from my personal and professional experience how caring is important in many aspects of our lives. There is a professional type of caring that can be developed between two persons (nurse-patient or educator-student). This relationship needs time and can be nurtured and reinforced to promote the development of a caring towards others, outside the initial professional relationship. In the personal realm, there is also one’s innate behavior of caring. I want to distinguish between these two categories of caring because many nurses and educators think it’s impossible to change one’s attitude in our modern (and often cold and uncaring) society. By this distinction, I want to clarify that we, as a nurse scholars who are interested in caring, should work to integrate the professional caring in our science. As a PhD student interested in professional caring in nursing, I’m exploring the professional caring relationship between nursing students and their educators because I strongly believe that for caring to be expressed in all the different domains of nursing (practice, theory, research and policy), we must improve our reflection on, and attention to, the idea of caring in the learning process.

In the course of my first year in my PhD program, I developed a deeper understanding about the difference between a caring and non-caring educator and how this can affect learning processes. I realized how it’s important to function within a safe environment of teaching-learning and how professional caring can have a positive influence on me as a student and on my learning and professional processes. Through my doctoral project, I hope to develop pedagogical knowledge that will help all nurses with a teaching role (educators, directors, nursing scholars)  understand that caring is also taught through the relationship we develop with our students. We need to focus more on developing professional caring in our profession to prepare the next generation of nurses to fulfill their social mandate. Patients and families need caring and competent nurses, and our students need educators that embody this concept to learn the scope depth of what caring is all about.

Houssem Eddine Ben Ahmed

Ph.D. student in Nursing Science

Université de Montréal

houssemeddinebenahmed@hotmail.fr