Emerging from the darkness and stepping into the light: Implementing an understanding of the experience of nurse addiction into nursing education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abuse of drugs and alcohol occurs across all cultures, generations, and occupations, including nursing. Nurse addiction is a topic of serious concern that is often dismissed or ignored in the profession. Impaired nurses can become dysfunctional in their ability to provide safe, appropriate patient care. This qualitative study explored the lived experience of nurses who have been addicted to substances. Knowledge of this phenomenon may help guide nurses, nurse educators, and nursing students more accurately understand the reality of substance use disorder in the profession. In this qualitative study, 14 nurse addicts in recovery were interviewed about their experiences and risk perceptions. Analysis was conducted through coding, the identification of meanings and themes, and the use of qualitative research software. Five themes were identified from the study: (a) Fear was a significant part of the experience of being a nurse who was addicted; (b) Shame and guilt were felt by nurses who were addicted; (c) Poor coping: Addicted nurses reported having underdeveloped coping skills; (d) Control: Addicted nurses felt an increased need to control their environments; and (e) A core problem inherent in nurses who were addicted was a belief that addiction would never happen to them. Discussion of the five identified themes was followed by a discussion about addiction risk, prevention, and suggestions for application in nursing education. Participants discussed their experience with nurse addiction in their nursing education experiences and offered suggestions for more effective ways to teach the subject in nursing school. Implications for nursing education were then discussed, including using peer educators, namely, recovering nurse addicts, as teachers of this subject. Implications for nurses globally are presented. Finally, the overall theme identified was that addicted nurses often felt misunderstood and judged, and they desired to be accepted among others in the profession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".