María del Carmen Solano Ruiz is a senior lecturer in the University of Alicante’s Critical Patient Care area. She earned her First-Cycle Undergraduate Degree in Nursing from the University of Alicante in 1991 and her Second-Cycle Undergraduate Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Miguel Hernández University in 2001. In 2007 she finished her doctoral thesis on the experiences of those who have suffered a heart attack, for which she received a cum laude distinction and the San Juan de Dios Foundation’s Award for the Best Research Work.
From 1991 to 1997, Ms Solano worked as a nurse in the critical patient care area of Elche General University Hospital, Alicante province, Spain.
In 1997 she became a university lecturer at the UA Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Nursing, where she has delivered several courses on the Undergraduate Degree in Nursing, such as Advanced Clinical Nursing, Nursing Patient Care in Special Units and Medical and Surgical Nursing. Her training as an anthropologist has allowed her to teach qualitative research courses. Since 2006 she has been a lecturer on the Master’s Degree in Nursing Science, on courses like Educational Patient Care Anthropology, Applied Qualitative Research in Health Sciences and Phenomenology, and also on the PhD programmes in Nursing and Patient Care Culture and in Practical Nursing and Education (her courses include Data Analysis in Qualitative Research and Applied Phenomenology).
Her research focuses on two topics: applied educational anthropology in nursing undergraduates’ clinical internships and experiences regarding health and disease. Her most relevant papers have been published in high-impact international journals, such as Nursing Education Today, Nursing Ethics, Journal of Advanced Nursing or Journal of Clinical Nursing, among others. She has supervised a total of 11 doctoral theses, all of which got a perfect score, and has two 6-year research activity periods recognised by the Spanish Committee for Research Activity Assessment (CNEAI).
Ms Solano has published three books and numerous book chapters on education in patient care. She has taken part as either principal investigator or collaborator in various research projects on nursing patient care and teaching in nursing undergraduates’ clinical internships.
She has also held academic management positions, such as vice dean for Academic Affairs at the Faculty of Health Sciences and secretary to the Department of Nursing’s Management Team, and currently serves as head of the Department of Nursing.