Building a Shared Conceptual Frame

This chapter aims to provide the reader with a conceptual frame that integrates applied drama and person-centred nursing. By applying performance theory to person-centred nursing concepts and practices, this chapter creates a framework that is shared across both research languages, translating across the philosophies and practices that define them both. This chapter is a conceptual journey which uses themes and topics as lightning rods for the framework to be created, defined, and expanded. This includes a focus on the concepts of risk, vulnerability, debility, and uncertainty and how they relate to person-centred nursing, and ultimately how considering this through a perspective informed by applied drama and performance theory we find new ways of perceiving an approach to teaching person-centred nursing. This conjunction of applied drama theory and person-centred nursing theory continues, helping us to reframe many perceived barriers to person-centred nursing through applied drama. This chapter also seeks to address a key concern for educating person-centred nurses, namely the creation of spaces in which to challenge oneself to promote a flourishing towards person-centredness. By exploring a combination of spaces defined and created by drama practice including the congenial, the dilemmatic, and the potential, a concept has grown to suggest the use of drama to address even more of the barriers facing the development of person-centredness in nursing students. The last sections of this chapter consolidate and then expand on the potential discovered in creating a shared conceptual frame between drama and nursing. What drama can do with person-centred nursing is explored through the notion of facilitation and performance as a person-centred approach, whilst the idea of performativity clashes with the concept of authenticity. This produces a new appreciation of person-centred nursing, and how drama theories and approaches can work with educational practices to promote sympathetic presence as a performed skill.