Donna Frost

212 The purpose of this chapter is to present the findings of this collaborative inquiry concerning the facilitation of the development of professional artistry in nursing practice. These results form the other half of the story that was begun in chapter six with presentation of the findings concerning the nature of professional artistry. Understanding the nature of professional artistry is necessary to being able to facilitate its development yet, within the CCCI, becoming able to explicate professional artistry was very much tied up with learning to nurture it in our own and each other’s practice. Within the CCCI we came to conceptualise the process of developing professional artistry as being like a journey. We each moved from one ‘place’ to ‘another’, metaphorically speaking, in terms of how we looked at and understood our professional practice and, indeed, how we practised as professionals. Setting out, we were unused and generally speaking unable to recognise and articulate theprofessional artistry in our practice. Byclosure of theCCCIwewere able to talk about and describe our professional artistry, we had developed strategies which we recognised as helpful in facilitating its development, and had built up evidence to support our assertion that ‘professional artistry powers our practice’ (WendyNPI-Mtg 10 -Rec 1 of 7 ). Furthermore, we had been changed as people. Our experiences of the journey were individual yet there were particular significant moments or milestones common to all our journeys. This chapter presents those milestones, the kinds of journeys we made as ‘travellers’ and the strategies that we found helpful in enabling each other to make the journey. As in thepreviouschapter, thefindingspresentedherearise fromamultifacetedset of data generated within the RN and NP inquiry groups, working in the ways described in chapters four and five of this thesis. See Table 7 . 1 for a list of abbreviations used when referencing a data fragment 13 . Two new abbreviations are used in this chapter as compared to Chapter 6 : ‘Post’ and ‘FP’. The same considerations with respect to transcription apply here as in previous chapters. Not all interviews, conversations or meetings were fully transcribed. Where a page number is given that indicates a full transcription of the interview, conversation or meeting concerned. Otherwise the audio recording in which the statement occurs is given. 13 For readability the construction ‘he/she/they’ is avoided when a third person pronoun is required. Within each practice example only one personal pronoun is used to refer to the nurse, and another to the other person or people in the example. This means that in some of the examples the nurse is female, in others male or gender neutral. Usage is consistent within each example.