Hosu Ryu is a mental health nurse and a lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
In this episode Bronwyn talks to Hosu about her PhD research exploring what it is like for nurses to work in an eating disorders unit. We find out that this is a challenging area to work in and students who who have placements in this area rarely return there as graduates. Hosu wanted to explore why this was.
She spoke with newly qualified nurses about their experiences, and this took her back to her learning about psychodynamic understanding of transference and counter-transference.
We hear in this podcast about how valuable it is to have experience of the world you are researching. In this case Hosu knows how to approach the topic area because she is intimately familiar with that world. This links with our episode with Cara Bailey whose knowledge of the Emergency Department allowed her to ask questions about the way different kinds of patients experienced death and the impact that had on nurses.
Hosu describes the questions that she asked the nurses to get them to talk openly and we can see that skilful questions allow participants to explore an experience in a lot of depth.
References
Ryu H, Hamilton B, Tarrant B. (2022) Early career mental health nurses’ emotional experiences in specialist eating disorder units, Victoria, Australia. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. 31(1):230-239. doi: 10.1111/inm.12955.
Adventures in Research 