Attitudes Regarding Nursing

How the nursing profession is to be perceived is of concern from several points of view. Attempts to identify and establish a theory of nursing practice have been hampered by the practical, clinical orientation of nursing activity and the often rule-bound but theoretically inchoate adaptation of social science ideas to clinical practice (Levine, 1995). Bent (1993) urges a nursing theory in terms of feminist social critique, which articulates historical (i.e., institutional, professional) forces of oppression of female-identified career paths with a view toward transforming well-documented institutionally and socially sanctioned absence of self-esteem into a project of "empowerment and caring" by way of questioning and influencing health-care philosophy, priorities, and systems. Levine argues that (for example) nurses should use diagnostic techniques and terms and not couch them in words meant to maintain what is in fact a socially, not medically, constructed hier

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nd family (Czerwiec, 1996; Grossman, 1996)--even when those expectations fly in the face of institutional hierarchical arrangements and even though nurses as a group bear much responsibility and wield little authority (Shindul-Rothschild, Berry, & Long-Middleton, 1996; Cullen, 1995). As the structure of institutional health-care delivery has been undergoing transformation and consolidation, RN presence in hospitals has been reduced and lower-wage support-staff (unlicensed assistive personnel or UAP) increased, while administrative and patient-care productivity, speed, and compassion demands on remaining staff RNs have increased (Shindul-Rothschild, Berry, & Long-Middleton, 1996). Presumption of a nurse's obligation to have both compassion and competence and to function solely as a support mechanism for what might be called "real" health-care delivery by doctors so dominates popular attitudes that it is the foundation for characterizations of nurses in such television programs as ER and Chicago Hope, where by and large nurses engage in clinical support, whether on behalf of patients or doctors. None of the on-the-line tensions and priority pulls so familiar to nursing discourse are at issue on these programs. Cullen (1995) asserts
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Approximate Word count = 1385
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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