Learning to keep patients safe: Emotional safety for learning and complexity in the nursing workforce

The focus in this chapter is on the experiences of student nurses and newly qualified nurses (NQNs) as they transition into independent practice and their learning from and in practice. In an investigation into NQNs’ ability to re-contextualise knowledge to allow them to deliver, organise and supervise care (Allan et al. 2016), Allan et al. (2017) found that NQNs progressively put knowledge learnt in university to work by drawing on interconnected domains of learning, including embodied and emotional knowledge. These projects found that attaining competence during the transition period to confident professional is underpinned by knowledge re-contextualisation (Evans et al., 2010).