| Nursing professional identity is a concept that represents the lived experience of being a nurse. The concept includes personal and professional attributes and considers the intertwining of his or her personal and professional identities. Nursing professional identity considers the manner in which nurses incorporate the fundamental values and the ideals of the nursing profession into their everyday practices. Practicing with integrity, caring behaviors, and a passion for leading efforts to improve healthcare are evidence of nursing professional identity.;Forming or having a nursing professional identity is a competency for nursing education at all levels. Research has described the phenomenon of nursing professional identity in nursing students and nurses in the patient care settings. The research offers little insight into the nursing professional identity of experienced nurses situated in senior leadership positions.;This Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the experiences and meanings for nurses in senior leadership positions. Semi-structured interviews with eight alumni of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellows Program provided the text for hermeneutical interpretation. Through a cyclical process, the interpretive team revealed two constitutive patterns and four themes. The first constitutive pattern, Nursing in-the-leader-world, depicts the unique experience of being a nurse in a senior leadership role and arises from two themes: Viewing/engaging through the nursing lens and Being/presenting oneself authentically. The second constitutive pattern, Caring in the everyday world, is derived from two themes: Speaking/translating the nursing language and Representing/advocating/providing for others.;The patterns and themes provide a faithful illustration of the phenomenon of nursing professional identity for nurses in senior leadership positions. The patterns and themes of this study add to the depth of understanding nursing professional identity from a previously unresearched perspective. The findings of this study fill a gap in the literature related to lived experiences for nurses in senior leadership positions. The findings provide valuable insights from participants with long-standing successful careers in nursing and leadership. |
