Learning for community nurse leaders

By creating social learning spaces that intersect the boundaries between theory and practice, the Queen's Institute of Community Nursing (QICN), previously Queen's Nursing Institute, encourages novel leadership teaching and learning techniques during community nurse leadership programmes. Within these spaces, creative activities can shape the comprehension of complex ideas by bridging art and science.

A recent leadership programme for nurses working at a strategic level used a Japanese Haiku (traditional 17th Century Japanese poetry) workshop to stimulate intellectual creativity in analysing and reflecting the many facets of leading. The practice of writing Haikus has been cited as having therapeutic benefits and its use has been recognised as an educational tool for healthcare practitioners (Biley and Champney-Smith, 2002; Stephenson and Rosen, 2015).

In addition, when taught for creative writing, it encouraged empathy and supported transformative learning while showcasing the use of art in practice (Gair, 2012). It can also be used as an aesthetic method in research to analyse and translate data by capturing participants' depth and intensity of emotions, engagement and experiences (Prendergast et al, 2009).