RESUMO
PURPOSE: The purpose of the study was to describe the essential structure of the lived experience of clinical nurses' interpersonal relations among nurses, patients, and others in the ward setting of the hospital. METHOD: Six nurses who have experienced from 4 to 7 years on the same ward setting, were interviewed. The data were collected from September, 2000 to May, 2001 and analyzed using Colaizzi's (1978) method of phenomenology. RESULT: In this study, 7 themes were extracted: difficulty of interpersonal relations after being familiar with work, developing good relations with doctors, patients, and their significant others as experience increased, generation gap among individual nurses, evaluating other nursing colleagues on their past experience in ward settings, avoiding nurses with whom one was in conflict, sometimes, resolving conflict through getting together with colleagues informally, having a limited interpersonal network, experiencing becoming mature through struggling with the difficulty of interpersonal relations. CONCLUSION: Nurse managers need to provide resources, opportunities, and information to clinical nurses through fully understanding the characteristics of nurses' interpersonal relations. In addition, they should minimize the factors which intervene with good interpersonal relations among clinical nurses.