Donna Frost

Chapter 2 38 Overview of the literature The literature examined for this concept analysis can be divided into three broad categories: personal accounts, theoretical work and research papers. The personal accounts include reflections on professional practice, anecdotes and tributes or obituaries written in honour of professionals recognised by their peers as demonstrating a particular quality in their practice. The literature with a theoretical focus includes literature reviews and concept analyses, and a number of sources examining and challenging the principles and assumptions underpinning professional practice or research into practice. It also includes theoretical or philosophical work that builds on earlier research, for example Titchen ( 2019 ). The third category, research papers or theses, can themselves be divided into two areas. Firstly, those studies in which information about professional artistry came to light while another, related concept or topic was being researched (eg. Thomson, Petty & Moore, 2014 ). The related topics include, for example, experiential knowledge in district nursing (McIntosh, 1996 ), professional craft knowledge within nursing, and its facilitation (Titchen, 1998 , 2000 ), the development of competence among certified holistic nurses (Sharoff, 2006 ), and investigations of expertise within midwifery (Price & Johnson, 2006 ) or nursing (Manley et al., 2005 ; Hardy et al., 2009 b). Secondly, those studies in which professional artistry, or aspects of it, were the explicit focus of the research. Included in this group are studies carried out in medicine (Daoud, 2004 ), teaching (Grainger, 2003 ), occupational therapy (Paterson et al., 2005 ) and with business or other professionals regarded as being at the top of their game (Bennink, 2008 ; Austen, 2010 ). I found no studies in nursing in which professional artistry was the explicit focus of the research. Several studies in nursing have, however, examined the art of nursing (eg. Appleton, 1993 ; LeVasseur, 2002 ; Duran & Çetinkaya-Uslusoy, 2015 ). Gramling ( 2004 b), for example sought narrative descriptions of ‘nursing as art’ from people who had experienced critical illness and Rahim et al. ( 2016 ) examined practising nurses understandings of artful nursing. Stockhausen ( 2006 ) examines the idea of artistry, with a focus on reflection-in-action among nurses during patient encounters while also involved with students. Chan ( 2014 ) looks at the impact of using artistic approaches in nursing education, concluding that the arts, and artistic ways of thinking, enrich nursing education. None of these researchers examined professional artistry in its entirety.