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Ms. Dwyer is a doctoral student, and Dr. Hunter Revell is Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, College of Nursing, North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
The authors have disclosed no potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.
An essential responsibility of professional nurses is to provide care for patients experiencing an illness or injury. However, providing care for these patients can trigger feelings of emotional stress. The emotional toll of caring has the potential to cause physical and psychological harm to nurses, a phenomenon that has been coined the cost of caring (Figley, 1999). Researchers across a variety of practice areas have begun to call attention to this practice concern, and considerable attention has been paid to the emotional cost of caring in nursing practice (Beck & Gable, 2012; Sira, White, Swanson, Lamson, & Meadors, 2009; Yoder, 2010).
Despite the importance of maintaining a close link between nursing education and nursing practice, a gap exists between how nurse educators teach nursing students to identify and manage the emotional challenges of practice and nurses' experiences after they enter practice. Although researchers have highlighted the emotional toll of nursing work as an emerging practice concern (Rudman & Gustavsson, 2011; Sung, Seo, & Kim, 2012), how nursing students learn about the emotional toll of practice is not clearly understood. Nursing students must understand the emotional nature of practice to meet the challenges of providing care in a demanding practice environment (Bulmer Smith, Profetto-McGrath, & Cummings, 2009). Recognition of the potential cost of caring and an understanding of self-care strategies can help students manage these challenges.
In response to the need to strengthen education-practice linkages, a comprehensive literature review of how nurse educators prepare nursing students for the emotional challenges of practice is needed. A deeper understanding of the state of the science of how nurse educators teach students about the emotional challenges of nursing will provide a foundational understanding for setting an educational agenda to help to build these important education-practice linkages.
Background
Emotional responses to providing care to patients are inherent in nursing work, and several researchers have attempted to define these emotional challenges (Coetzee & Klopper, 2010; Sabo, 2006). Several terms describe the emotional toll of nursing; however, a clear conceptual definition of the emotional challenges of nursing...