Abstract:

Background: The adaptation processes of newly employed young nurses are adversely affected by the environments in which they are exposed to unfriendly behaviors. Therefore, realizing the young nurses’ relationships with their colleagues is important to improve their adaptation processes. Objectives: To understand the core of newly employed young nurses’ experiences, thoughts and feelings regarding relationships with their senior colleagues during the first six months of their work life. Methods: This study with a descriptive phenomenological qualitative design was conducted between April 2021 and August 2021, in a university hospital in Izmir, with 14 newly employed young nurses chosen using the purposive sampling technique. In-depth interviews were conducted through video conferences. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed according to Colaizzi’s Technique, and also Watson’s Theory of Human Caring was employed so as to reach the essence of the experiences in the process of forming the main themes of the study. Results: The relationship between newly employed young nurses and senior colleagues of them consists of three main themes and two subthemes: main themes are determined as “caring/positive pproaches”, “incivility behaviors”, “insufficient support”. Subthemes are determined as “supportive and developing approach”, “being accepted and being cared”. Conclusion: The outcomes of the study indicated that newly employed young nurses find supportive and developing approaches of the preceptor nurses and experience positive occurrences in the transition process demonstrated the existence of the supportive relationship on the other hand unsupportive and incivility behaviors of their senior colleagues and managers demonstrated the existence of negative relationship. In order to the prevent newly employed young nurses being exposed to negative colleague approaches in the transition process, strategies based on Watson’s Theory of Human Caring can be developed at the institutional and national level.

Keywords: