I'm published!

The excitement of seeing my name as a first author published in a nursing journal has resulted in quite a large smile. Even better than this is having one of my nursing colleagues messaging me a photo of her reading it in the paper version! This is only the beginning of more publications of the work I'm doing in my PhD and what I find through the research I'm doing. Click HERE for the link to the article, the British Journal of Cardiac Nursing will let you read the first page without a subscription, but your library may provide access to the full article.

In brief, it is a short explanation of what I am exploring in my PhD. Within this paper I provide a brief definition of the concept of Burden of Treatment and how I think the lived experience of Chronic Heart Failure may interact with that concept through the symptoms that patients experience. Exploring that idea will be the work of my PhD and I look forward to finding out more details around these ideas that have yet to be explored.

Even within this excitement, my critical self is saying this isn't a "real" publication as there is no data in it and it doesn't have any findings. It is only a proposal of an idea that has lead to the development of my literature review and my mixed method study. Further, I can already see things in it that I would change, but as my supervisors would say to me, "it was the best that I knew and thought at that time." So I am making that critical voice be quiet and celebrating that I am now published and it means that within my PhD thesis I'll be able to add this as a published work! This is a great day and an accomplishment I am proud of.