Background: Newly graduated nurses can experience a challenging time when they enter work life. The transition process from student to professional can almost be shocking due to psychosocial factors, which in addition can affect the health negatively. From a public health science perspective, the problem should be investigated with the aim of contributing to more knowledge in the field.
Aim: The aim of this study is to examine newly graduated nurse’s experiences of the transition from student to registered nurse in relation to the psychosocial health.
Method: A qualitative method was applied with a purposive-snowball sampling. Six informants were included, all of whom had undergone the transition from nursing student to professional nurse. Individual semi-structured interviews were chosen as the interview form, and a manifest content analysis was used as the analysis method.
Result: The study’s results consist of two categories. The first category is the importance of time on the psychosocial health. Lack of work experience can be felt as an initial insecurity in the professional role as a registered nurse, which can negatively affect the psychosocial health. However, with more work experience a self-confidence in the professional role as a nurse developed which in turn promoted the psychosocial health. The second category is the importance of resources on the psychosocial health. Internal abilities and external support facilitated the transition, and contributed to a positive psychosocial well-being, while a lack of resources made the transition more difficult.
Conclusions: The factors time and resources had an impact on the transition and on the psychosocial health. It also emerged that newly graduated nurses are not sufficiently prepared and that improvements should be implied in the education and in the workplace to facilitate the transition. In addition to that had also Antonovsky’s theory sense of coherences an impact on the transition. The theory’s three components, manageability, comprehensibility, and meaningfulness where central for the transition.