Donna Frost

The critical creative collaborative inquiries in action 129 5 residential care to between 100 and 200 residents, as well as two large community nursing teams. The nurses who took part in the study worked in either Elm Tree House, one of the residential locations, or South Side, one of the community nursing teams. This section begins by introducing each member of the RNI with a short description of their situation at the start of the inquiry. The quotes are taken from the first meeting at which all four women were present, where they shared some of their thoughts about joining the inquiry group. The complete RNI inquiry journey is then summarised. Two particular aspects of the RNI are elaborated: the use of metaphors to explore understandings of professional artistry and the impact that the inquiry activities had on the way we viewed our practice. Jane Jane qualified as a nurse eight years before the start of the inquiry. She’d completed her bachelor level nursing education at a university of applied sciences and worked for some years thereafter as a staff nurse in a large teaching hospital in the region, first on a general surgical ward and then an orthopaedic ward. She’d made the shift to care for older people three years prior to the inquiry beginning and had worked since that time as one of the care-coordinators 7 within Elm Tree House, providing nursing care to older people living with chronic or progressive physical illness such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Jane’s daily work included providing nursing care, together with three or four colleagues, for the 26 residents on the unit, and care-coordination activities for seven of the residents. Jane was also on the ‘senior duty nurse’ roster and worked several shifts a month in which she carried the duty telephone and could be called from her own unit to deal with incidents across all ten units within Elm Tree House, including those offering nursing care to people with dementia. 7 Care-coordinator positions are only available to bachelor qualified nurses, not diploma level nurses, and all the bachelor educated nurses on this unit, and also within the community nursing team South Side, worked as care-coordinators.