Transcultural Experiences of Internationally Educated Nurses in Canada

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Migration and Mobility

Proposal

I am a PhD candidate (Educational Research) in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. My PhD supervisor is Dr. Yan Guo. Currently, I am beginning data analysis.

The purpose of my research is to explore how soft skills in workplace communication affect Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs) in Canada, and how IENs conform to or resist soft skills in their everyday nursing practice. In the current literature, there are many references to IENs experiencing difficulty with communication, interpersonal, and soft skills (Lum, Dowedoff, Bradley, Kerekes, & Valeo, 2015). These difficulties are often explained in terms of the IENs lacking certain skills or abilities. These purported deficits make it difficult for IENs to effectively communicate in the workplace. The discourse of deficit dominates all discussions of IENs and their skills.
My research addresses the following research questions:
1. What are the perspectives of Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs) about soft skills in workplace communication?
2. How do soft skills affect the integration of IENs into the workplace?
3. How do IENs conform to or resist soft skills in their nursing practice?

The phenomenon of IENs' soft skills in workplace communication is complex and raises issues of workplace discrimination, power relations, and the transferability of nursing skills, knowledge and experience from one culture to another. In my study, I seek to understand these issues through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of life stories created by IENs within a framework that combines elements of transculturalism (Hebert, 2005), transnationalism (Vertovec, 2001) and the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006).
Transculturalism is useful for understanding the cultural exchanges between IENs and other actors in the care environment and for framing the impact those cultural exchanges have on the IENs and their patients. This aspect of transculturalism will help to identify the hidden connections in features of soft skills discourse. Transnationalism can be useful for understanding the networks IENs maintain across borders and the effects these networks have on them. This will provide a way to explore how IENs use their first languages in their nursing practice. The new mobilities paradigm is helpful for understanding how immigrants view a sense of place or home. When immigrants leave a place, they carry parts of it with them, and then reassemble those parts in their new homes (Sheller & Urry, 2006). Similarly, when IENs move from place to place (countries or hospitals), they become carriers of diverse ways of thinking and knowledge creation that informs their nursing practice.
Data were collected through life story interviews with six IENs from the Philippines and one from India. All IENs were interviewed between January 2018 and September 2018. Four participated in three interviews each and the other three in two interviews each for a total of eighteen interviews. All interviews were face to face, recorded on a digital recorder and lasted between 60 - 75 minutes. I chose life story because I wanted to include the voices of nurses in a way that they felt in control, through telling stories about their own education and work experiences. The power dynamic in the life story interview relationship favors the story teller rather than the researcher compared to traditional interviews (Atkinson, 2007).

The soft skills discourse as it relates to IENs will be analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2010). CDA questions ideology and hegemony to expose inequalities in discourse and focuses on the role of discourse in the reproduction of power and dominance (Fairclough, 2010).

The results of this study will contribute to the knowledge of soft skills in healthcare. It is important for nurse educators and researchers to properly understand how a deficit discourse affects IENs doing their jobs before concluding that IENs have language and culture deficiencies. Although the solutions to my research problems may require a deeper analysis of the social and economic situations of IENs, I hope the results of this study will inform researchers in their continued development and implementation of changes to the IEN process of becoming a registered nurse. I also hope that the results will inform nurse educators to design communication skills training courses for IENs that are relevant and complement IENs’ diverse skills set. Most importantly, I hope that the voices of the IENs in this study will disrupt the current discourse of deficit, which has framed much of the discussion on IENs in a way that presents a negative view of their skills and knowledge.

Author

• Marcia Kim, University of Calgary