Transforming general practice: the redistribution of medical work in primary care

The paper focuses on the redistribution of medical work within primary health care teams. It reports the results of the analysis of interviews with general practitioners, practice nurses and managers, undertaken as part of an ethnographic study of primary care organisation and practice during a period of rapid organisational change. By examining the ways in which the respondents account for how work is being redefined and redistributed, we explore how current government policy and professional discourses combine to reconfigure both the identities of those who work in primary care and the nature of patienthood. In particular, we show how general practitioners are being reconfigured as medical specialists or consultants in ways that seem to depart radically from earlier claims that general practice is a distinctive field of social or biographical medicine. Within this new discourse medical work is distributed between doctors, nurses and unqualified staff in ways which make explicit the reduction of general practice work to sets of biomedical problems or tasks. At the same time, the devolution of much general practice work to less qualified and cheaper personnel is justified by drawing on a discourse of person-centred medicine.     

Nursing, knowledge and practice

Recent commentators have suggested that academic knowledge is irrelevant to nursing practice and may actually undermine nursing's traditional caring ethos. Furthermore, by making nursing more academic, it is claimed that 'natural' but non-academic carers are prevented from pursuing a career in nursing. Debates about the relationship between nursing, knowledge and practice have a long history and have to be understood in terms of wider political and economic issues relating to nursing, its status within society and the changing role of nurses within the health services division of labour. One crucial issue is nursing's status as women's work. Critics of developments in nurse education draw an ideological equation between nursing work and the traditional female role. From this perspective the qualities that make a good nurse cannot be taught, rather they are founded on 'natural' feminine skills. Irrespective of whether caring is 'natural' or not, it is questionable as to whether, for today's nurses, being caring is sufficient. The shape of nursing jurisdiction is a long way removed from its origins in the Victorian middle-class household. In addition to their traditional caring role, contemporary nurses may also have complex clinical, management and research responsibilities, as well as being crucial coordinators of service provision. It is suggested that these and future developments in health services make the need for an educated nursing workforce even more pressing. In order to adequately prepare nurses for practice, however, it is vital that nurse education reflects the reality of service provision.     

Practice nurses and the effects of the new general practitioner contract in the English National Health Service: The extension of a professional project?

This paper reports the impact on nurses working in primary health care settings of changes to the general practitioner (GP) contract in England implemented in 2004. Previous changes to the GP contract in 1990, which gave financial rewards for health promotion activities, were seen as enabling nurses to take on work that GPs did not want and providing an impetus for the development of a professional project (Broadbent, J. (1998). Practice nurses and the effects of the new general practitioner contract in the British NHS: the advent of a professional project? Social Science & Medicine, 47(4), 497–506). Our study, which involved interviews with nurses from 20 practices, finds that nurses are taking on work which has previously been the exclusive preserve of medical professionals. An increasing emphasis in nurses' accounts on technical skills and knowledge may help decouple nursing from a narrative of caring, which has been seen as detracting from professional advancement. Our research suggests that practice nurse work is changing to reflect a more medical (and masculine) orientation to service delivery. At the same time, nursing work is described as routine and template driven, which may limit claims to ‘professional’ status. The reaction of some practice nurses to Health Care Assistants encroaching on what was previously practice nurse territory suggests a policing of boundaries, rather than an inclusive approach to colleagues within the nursing team. This resonates with Davies' (Davies, C. (1995). Gender and the professional predicament in nursing. Bucks: Open University Press) suggestion that professionalisation as a process involves compliance with a masculine notion of professionalism (autonomous, elite, individual, divisive, detached) which marginalises feminine attributes and devalues the work done by women. The study also raises questions about the role of caring in general practice settings where nurses choose to prioritise other concerns.     

Expert nurses and the division of labour in hospitals

This article analyses nursing expertise with a particular focus at the level of clinical and organizational practice. Through an examination of a specialist team of hospital nurses, and drawing on the concept of a community of practice, the article provides a critique of discussions of nursing expertise which can be overly normative, individualistic or divorced from practice. The theoretical background to our analysis is the division of labour in health care; the case study on which this analysis is based is a particular health policy: the introduction of critical care outreach services. The empirical portions of the article are based on a qualitative study of eight such services in England. In the first part of the analysis we elaborate on three ways in which 'expertise' can be deployed in practice: teaching and training; consultancy and advice; and practical clinical action. Each of these is shown to be related to the development of a community of practice. In the second part of the analysis we examine in more detail the impact of outreach nurses on the division of labour in health care and on traditional occupational hierarchies. A general implication of our findings is that expertise has fundamentally social characteristics which need to be acknowledged in academic and policy discourse.     

Professional boundary struggles in the context of healthcare change: the relational and symbolic constitution of nursing ethos in the space of possible professionalisation

The paper draws on Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the symbolic order and his little used concept of ethos in order to gain novel understandings of boundary struggles between nursing and medicine as well as internally in nursing. The constituents of boundary struggles are analysed in the context of healthcare transformation, focusing on organisational, institutional and political boundary undertakings. Changing conditions for boundary demarcations and professionalisation include a preference for evidence-based knowledge and practice, seen as a remedy against common problems in health care. The paper shows how nurses use the changes in ‘the space of possible professionalisation’ in their struggle for professionalisation when they expand their scope of practice and embark on what is conceptualised as a curing ethos, where nursing is understood as a discipline performing practices that lead to cure. However, this is repudiated by the medical profession at all levels. Moreover, curing stands opposed to the caring ethos in nursing and boundary struggles surface as ‘ethos confrontation’ between caring- and curing-oriented nurses in practice. The boundary struggles analysed in this paper raise important questions about healthcare manageability and the development of sustainable professional environments.     

Needs, closeness and responsibilities. An inquiry into some rival moral considerations in nursing care

Abstract The first part of this paper seeks to clarify how interpersonal relationships are generally rooted in considerations about trust, vulnerability and interpersonal dependence. However, for nurse–patient relationships, and from the point of view of justice and fair rationing, it is essential to investigate their distinct moral nature. Hence, the second part of the paper argues that nurse–patient relationships, as a special kind of interpersonal relationship, raise particular normative issues. I will discuss dilemmas facing nurses and professional care-givers in general who are torn between their obligations to existing patients and more general and impartial considerations regarding the distribution of nursing care. This discussion concerning the normative claims of immediacy and mercy vs. fairness in health care is a pressing issue for nursing care. The claims that arise from particular relationships in nursing care are typically associated with closeness to a person's vulnerabilities. The pressing issue is how considerations of mercy and protection of individual patients can be safeguarded within today's nursing and health-care practices in which distributivist considerations are crucial.     

Advancing nursing practice for improved health outcomes using the principles of perceptual control theory

This article describes how an empirically supported theory of human behaviour, perceptual control theory, can be used to advance nursing practice and improve health outcomes for people who are accessing nursing care. Nursing often takes a pragmatic approach to the delivery of care, with an emphasis on doing what appears to work. This focus on pragmatism can sometimes take precedence over any consideration of the underlying theoretical assumptions that inform decisions to take one particular approach over another or the mechanisms through which nursing interventions have their effects. For nursing to develop as a profession, there needs to be an increased focus on the core principles that underpin the delivery of care. In addition to understanding what works, nurses must develop their understanding of how and why particular approaches work or do not work. Understanding the fundamental principles that underpin nurses’ actions will lead to more efficient and effective approaches to the delivery of nursing care. It will also enable nurses to maximize those elements of their practice that are most beneficial for people and minimize other activities that either have little effect or actually lead to worse outcomes. In this article, we will propose that the phenomenon of control is fundamental to human health. Perceptual control theory provides a coherent theoretical framework that enables us to understand the phenomenon of control through a functional model of human behaviour. People are healthy when their neurochemical, physiological, biological, psychological and social states are all controlled satisfactorily. We will explain the implications of understanding health as control throughout the paper. From this perspective, we will argue that the aim of nurses and nursing should be to support people to maintain or recover control over those aspects of their lives that are important and meaningful to them.     

Are submissive nurses ethical?: reflecting on power anorexia

We believe that the notion of power anorexia, which we define as a lack of desire to exercise power, is central to reflections about nursing ethical concerns. Questioning the assumption that nurses are powerless, we argue that nurses can and do exercise power and that their actions and inactions have consequences not only for themselves, but also for those for whom they care. We propose that a feminist ethics perspective be used both to understand and to overcome nurses' power anorexia. Feminist thinkers remind us not only of oppression's psychological impact, but that stereotypical views about women are socially constructed and, therefore, can be changed. Nurses using this framework should explore the implications of a centralized notion of caring to the way we conceive of power relations in health care. Perhaps deconstructing caring by focusing on how nurses exercise power could help us to re-conceptualize nursing and promote new agendas for health and health care.     

Influences of the culture of science on nursing knowledge development: Using conceptual frameworks as nursing philosophy in critical care nursing

Nursing knowledge development and application are influenced by numerous factors within the context of science and practice. The prevailing culture of science along with an evolving context of increasingly technological environments and rationalization within health care impacts both the generation of nursing knowledge and the practice of nursing. The effects of the culture of science and the context of nursing practice may negatively impact the structure and application of nursing knowledge, how nurses practice, and how nurses understand the patients and families for whom they care. Specifically, the nature of critical care and its highly technical environment make critical care nursing especially vulnerable to these potentially negative influences. The influences of the culture of science and the increasingly technical practice context may result in an overreliance on the natural sciences to guide critical care nursing actions and an associated marginalization of the caring relationship in critical care nursing practice. Within this environment, nursing philosophy may not be foundational to nursing actions; rather, the dominant culture of science and the rationalization of health care may be informing nursing practice. As such, the ideology and goals of nursing may not be central to the practice of critical care nursing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of the culture of science on the development of nursing knowledge and theory. Further, we aim to describe the value of using conceptual frameworks, such as Roy's Adaptation Model, as a nursing philosophy to influence the development of person‐centred nursing knowledge and theory to inform critical care nursing practice as it related to the care of patients and families. In doing so, nursing philosophy is situated as foundational for nursing actions.     

Der Pflegeberuf im Spiegel der Öffentlichkeit

The following article represents the main results of studies in Germany treating the situation of nurses in hospitals and in long term care units focussing the image of nursing work—on the one hand from the public’s and on the other hand from the nurses’ perspectives. The article enters into the question what the general public and the nurses thinks about the nursing work, the nursing work conditions and trust in professional caring. As a result, it can be stated that the rating of nursing work and nursing work conditions in public differs. Nursing work is higher rated in public than the nursing work conditions and the quality of professional caring. In the nursing community a high identification with the nursing profession and nursing work can be determined. But there is lower job satisfaction and esteem for nursing work visible.     

Characteristics of registered nurses in nursing homes. Preliminary data from the 1985 National Nursing Home Survey.

Registered nurses work more often in other types of facilities or settings than in nursing homes. The typical RN working in a nursing home in 1985 was female, white, and married. RN's who work with the elderly tend to be older than the average RN. RN's on the staff of nursing homes in 1985 had a median age of about 45 years, and the majority had been working in their profession for 10 years or more. Studies have shown that nursing students associate negative stereotypes with caring for the elderly and that older health personnel, regardless of their profession, are more likely than their younger colleagues to view the elderly favorably (Feldbaum and Feldbaum, 1981; Smith, Jepson, and Perloff, 1982). Because the positions held most often by RN's who work full time in nursing homes are head nurse or supervisor or director of nursing, the actual hands-on care of the elderly is usually not performed by the registered nurse. That leaves the primary care of the elderly being provided by licensed practical nurses, licensed vocational nurses, and nurse's aides.     

A new advanced studies program for faculty development in primary care

To meet the growing demand for more innovative teaching in primary care medicine and simultaneously to improve the overall quality of family practice, McGill University and The Montreal General Hospital, with the cooperation of the McGill School of Nursing, have inaugurated a faculty development center offering a program for advanced studies in primary care medicine and nursing. This program is offered to physicians and nurses who are already members of, or plan to join, a university faculty to teach primary care medicine. The program is diverse and interdisciplinary. Advanced courses are offered in teaching methods, investigative principles, biomedical communication, and management. In addition, each student Fellow participates in academic activities in fields of education, clinical practice, research, and community health care. All Fellows and faculty of the center rotate periodically to several satellite community-based teaching practice units in urban and rural areas of Quebec and to a region of northern New Brunswick. This activity enriches the medical manpower of the various regions, and the urgan physicians acquire an increased awareness of the particular problems and challenges of practicing medicine where full hospital and laboratory services are not always available.     

Caring behaviors among nurses: fostering a conversation of gestures

Caring behaviors have been shown to financially benefit business in general and the health care industry in particular. Nursing presence is a concept representative of caring behaviors within the nursing profession. This article suggests a means through which nursing presence might be identified and taught. Patients may, as a result. increasingly view their assigned nurses as caring in attitude and behavior.     

THE STATUS OF RURAL NURSING IN AUSTRALIA: A REVIEW

ABSTRACT: While much has been written about the practice roles of remote area nurses in Australia, less is known about the role and function of the rural nurse. The majority of rural nurses practise in rural hospitals, community health settings and nursing homes. In contrast, the remote area nurses work setting is generally involved with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health care services. Rural nurses' practice setting is usually located in a larger organisation than that of the remote area nurse. There is usually at least one medical practitioner in the town or on-call close by. Nurses who are employed in the smaller rural hospitals have what has been described as a 'specialist generalist' role. This means that they are required to be multi-skilled and competent in a wide range of nursing and non-nursing practice. In contrast, nurses who work in base/provincial hospitals, may have either a generalist or specialist role. This paper provides a summary of the literature on Australian rural nurses and develops some of the themes contained therein.     

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Nursing: Ethics of Caring as a Guide to Dividing Tasks Between AI and Humans

Nurses have traditionally been regarded as clinicians that deliver compassionate, safe, and empathetic health care (Nurses again outpace other professions for honesty & ethics, 2018). Caring is a fundamental characteristic, expectation, and moral obligation of the nursing and caregiving professions (Nursing: Scope and standards of practice, American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, MD, 2015). Along with caring, nurses are expected to undertake ever‐expanding duties and complex tasks. In part because of the growing physical, intellectual and emotional demandingness, of nursing as well as technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI care robots are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. As technology becomes more advanced, efficient, and economical, opportunities and pressure to introduce AI into nursing care will only increase. In the first part of the article, we review recent and existing applications of AI in nursing and speculate on future use. Second, situate our project within the recent literature on the ethics of nursing and AI. Third, we explore three dominant theories of caring and the two paradigmatic expressions of caring (touch and presence) and conclude that AI—at least for the foreseeable future—is incapable of caring in the sense central to nursing and caregiving ethics. We conclude that for AI to be implemented ethically, it cannot transgress the core values of nursing, usurp aspects of caring that can only meaningfully be carried out by human beings, and it must support, open, or improve opportunities for nurses to provide the uniquely human aspects of care.     

Professional values and nursing

The values of nursing arise from a concern with human flourishing. If the desire to become a nurse is a reflection of an aspiration to care for others in need then we should anticipate that those who choose to nurse have a tendency towards the values we would normally associate with a caring profession (care, compassion, perhaps altruism, and so on). However, these values require a secure base if they are not to succumb to the corrupting pressures of the increasingly instrumental nature of the values of the institutions in which healthcare in general and nursing in particular takes place. One way of securing a base for withstanding the corrupting influences of the institution is to understand nursing as a practice in the sense in which Alasdair MacIntyre uses that term. In this brief paper I will outline ways in which the managerial imperative of meeting targets is both distorting practice and undermining nursing’s values. I conclude that understanding nursing as a MacIntyrean practice provides a refuge from what might otherwise be overwhelming pressures for nurses to adopt instrumental values to the detriment of professional caring values.     

An experiential theory of spiritual care in nursing practice

Spiritual care has been recognized as integral to nursing care for centuries, as described by Florence Nightingale, and has been studied in both medicine and sociology. Health care institutions, particularly faith-based health systems, also have recognized the importance of spiritual care. Both qualitative and quantitative research support the importance of spirituality in patient health. Although the profession, health care institutions, and research support spiritual care, there is no empirically derived theoretical framework to guide research in spiritual assessment and spiritual care. We used focus group data from registered nurses who care for the chronically ill (n = 25) in a large Midwestern academic health center to generate a grounded theory of spiritual care in nursing practice. What emerged from this study was a beginning theoretical framework to guide future spiritual care research.     

From being a nurse to becoming a ‘different’ doctor

Using interpretative phenomenological analysis to make meaning of the experiences of three highly qualified registered nurses who had enrolled in an undergraduate medical programme, this study provides insight into their personal journeys of wanting to become ‘different’ doctors. In so doing, they conceptualised their future selves as adding clinical reasoning and diagnostic skills to the patient-centred caring ethic of their nursing practice, becoming a multi-skilled community member or helping to fix the health care culture. By customising their identities, e.g. by splinting (aligning with their stronger nursing identity), by enriching current nursing practice with newly acquired theory as medical students or by patching a perceived deficiency (i.e. patient-centredness) in medicine, they tailored their identities. Their journeys had, however, not been the natural progression they had anticipated, threatened by perceived and/or real intrinsic (e.g. working as nurses whilst studying medicine) and extrinsic (e.g. interprofessional rivalry) factors. Rather than being accepted as legitimate newcomers to the medical profession, the women sometimes felt like intruders. Some nursing colleagues accused them of desertion. In response, they generally withheld their identities as nurses or medical students, compartmentalising their group membership. This study has highlighted the role of personal (e.g. prior experience; agency; resilience; personality) and contextual factors in ‘becoming’ a doctor. A recommendation emerging from this study is the need for interprofessional learning in the medical curriculum to cultivate a health care culture of collaboration rather than competition. Future research is required in terms of how allied health professionals transition to medicine.