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Nursing Discourse (nursing + discourse)
Selected AbstractsReflective practice and clinical supervision: meticulous rituals of the confessionalJOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING, Issue 2 2001Tony Gilbert BA MSc PhD RN PGCE Reflective practice and clinical supervision: meticulous rituals of the confessional Background.,Reflective practice and clinical supervision are progressively asserting hegemony upon nursing practice with claims of emancipation and empowerment. However, this is being achieved in an environment where there is little critical debate about the assumptions on which these practices are based. Aim.,This paper sets out to challenge the basis upon which reflective practice and clinical supervision are promoted within nursing discourse by employing Michel Foucault's (1982) concept of governmentality. Theme.,A broad Foucauldian perspective is used to demonstrate how the technologies of reflective practice and clinical supervision have been accommodated within modern forms of government. These technologies are consistent with the flattened hierarchies and increasing dispersal of practitioners in contemporary health care. In this context reflective practice and clinical supervision can be shown to function in two independent but interrelated ways. First as modes of surveillance disciplining the activity of professionals. Second, as ,confessional' practices that work to produce particular identities , autonomous and self-regulating. [source] Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursingNURSING INQUIRY, Issue 1 2003Dave Holmes The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ,caring' nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals' skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states' death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states' penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners. [source] Academics and practitioners: nurses as intellectualsNURSING INQUIRY, Issue 2 2002Colin A. Holmes Academics and practitioners: nurses as intellectuals In the author's experience, nurse educators working in universities generally accept that they are ,academics', but dismiss suggestions that they are ,intellectuals' because they see it as a pretentious description referring to a small number of academics and aesthetes who inhabit a conceptual world beyond the imaginative capacity of most other people. This paper suggests that the concept of the ,intellectual', if not the word itself, be admitted into nursing discourse through the adoption of a non-élitist Gramscian understanding, similar to the more recently formulated conception of the reflective practitioner. According to the Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci, intellectuals are those people who develop ways in which to construct the conditions of their own existence, a possibility he believed was open to all. It is suggested that, from a Gramscian perspective, all nurses are intellectuals to varying degrees, and nurse educators should not only be nurturing their own intellectualism but also the potential for intellectualism as it exists within each individual. The ways in which this project are related to Habermasian critical theory are also briefly outlined. [source] Ontologies of nursing in an age of spiritual pluralism: closed or open worldview?NURSING PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2010Barbara Pesut PhD RN Abstract North American society has undergone a period of sacralization where ideas of spirituality have increasingly been infused into the public domain. This sacralization is particularly evident in the nursing discourse where it is common to find claims about the nature of persons as inherently spiritual, about what a spiritually healthy person looks like and about the environment as spiritually energetic and interconnected. Nursing theoretical thinking has also used claims about the nature of persons, health, and the environment to attempt to establish a unified ontology for the discipline. However, despite this common ground, there has been little discussion about the intersections between nursing philosophic thinking and the spirituality in nursing discourse, or about the challenges of adopting a common view of these claims within a spiritually pluralist society. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the call for ontological unity within nursing philosophic thinking in the context of the sacralization of a diverse society. I will begin with a discussion of secularization and sacralization, illustrating the diversity of beliefs and experiences that characterize the current trend towards sacralization. I will then discuss the challenges of a unified ontological perspective, or closed world view, for this diversity, using examples from both a naturalistic and a unitary perspective. I will conclude by arguing for a unified approach within nursing ethics rather than nursing ontology. [source] Modes of rationality in nursing documentation: biology, biography and the ,voice of nursing'NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 2 2005Abbey Hyde Modes of rationality in nursing documentation: biology, biography, and the ,voice of nursing' This article is based on a discourse analysis of the complete nursing records of 45 patients, and concerns the modes of rationality that mediated text-based accounts relating to patient care that nurses recorded. The analysis draws on the work of the critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas, who conceptualised rationality in the context of modernity according to two types: purposive rationality based on an instrumental logic, and value rationality based on ethical considerations and moral reasoning. Our analysis revealed that purposive rationality dominated the content of nursing documentation, as evidenced by a particularly bio-centric and modernist construction of the workings of the body within the texts. There was little reference in the documentation to central themes of contemporary nursing discourses, such as notions of partnership, autonomy, and self-determination, which are associated with value rationality. Drawing on Habermas, we argue that this nursing documentation depicted the colonisation of the sociocultural lifeworld by the bio-technocratic system. Where nurses recorded disagreements that patients had with medical regimes, the central struggle inherent in the project of modernity became transparent , the tension between the rational and instrumental control of people through scientific regulation and the autonomy of the subject. The article concludes by problematising communicative action within the context of nursing practice. [source] | ||||||||||