Lived experiences of military nurses from war- a mini-review

Military nurses have acquired valuable experiences from caring for patients in war zones. Analysis of these experiences can create valuable knowledge for health care providers. The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the lived experiences of military nurses from the war extracted from published papers.

In this mini-review, an extensive search was conducted using different combination of keywords including “War”, “Nurse”, “Military”, “Qualitative Research”, “Lived Experience” and “Phenomenology” from the ProQuest, Science Direct, CINAHL, Ovid, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Sid, MagIran, and Irandoc databases from 2000 to 2018. The literature was independently reviewed by two authors.

The databases search yielded 30 records. According to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 9 papers were analyzed. After reviewing 9 records, 6 areas related to the lived experiences of military nurses from war included war stress, adaptation to war conditions, professional growth, nurses exposed to injury, ethical dilemmas, and management and leadership were extracted.

Military nurses experience a lot of difficulties during war. These experiences can be used to identify problems and challenges and provide appropriate solutions in similar situations. These experiences can also be used to generate knowledge in the field of training and preparing military nurses to face unconventional and critical situations.