The experience of knowing : a hermeneutic study of intuitive emergency nursing practice

This study described the nature and component themes captured within the intuitive practice of emergency nursing; it also explicates the nature of expert practice as define by Patricia Benner in 1984. The history of intuitive practice or as noted in this study the experience of knowing has to this point only been anecdotal. The experience of knowing needed to either be validated or refuted so that its place in emergency nursing could be found. The study was informed by the philosophy and method of phenomenology. The participants in the study were fourteen experienced emergency nurses with between 4.5 ‚Äö- 23 emergency nursing years. These participants through their stories and experiences of emergency practice expressed their experience of knowing. Through a van Manen process and Gadamerian analysis six themes associated with the ways in which my participants experienced knowing, were identified. These were named, knowledge, experience, connection, feeling, syncretism and trust. Further analysis uncovered a developmental relationship between the themes in general and with each other. Culminating in the reconstruction of Benner's expert stage into three distinct phases, Cognitive intuition, transitional intuition and embodied intuition. To enable the full expression of these findings a mathematical theory has been put forward.