Developing practice through the professional imagination

How can the perspective of the service user be made real and helpful in the professional education of community nurses? This article presents one answer to this question through encouraging nurses to write fictional accounts of how their practice appears to their own service users. Arising from a research project on the "patchwork text" assignment format in a professional degree course at Anglia Polytechnic University, the article presents two such accounts by community nurses undertaking the course. Their accounts illustrate the insights into professional issues that are produced by an explicitly imaginative exercise. A particularly important outcome, not expected by the researchers, was that the commentaries written by the nurses on their imagined scenarios, led, not to a discussion of "issues" (as in many cases) but to a precise and practical critique of their actual practice, suggesting a further dimension of the educational value of writing fiction as part of professional education courses.