A Caring Environment to Foster Male Nurses’ Quality of Working Life in Community Settings
Watson’s philosophy of human caring provided a disciplinary perspective to this phenomenological study. The aim of this research was to describe the meaning of quality of working life for five male nurses practicing in community healthcare in Québec, Canada. Previous studies have primarily focused on females, in hospital settings, and were based on paradigms of psychological distress (pathogenic perspective) rather than health (salutogenic perspective). The essence of the phenomenon stems directly from the eight themes that emerged from the interviews; it (the essence) states that for male nurses working in community healthcare, quality of working life means “a caring climate that fosters the empowerment of male nurses by trying to maintain harmony between their professional and family realms” (Brousseau, 2006).