Comparative Analysis of Nursing Practices

NURSING PRACTICES

INTRODUCTION

Nursing may be the most familiar health professional group in the world, second only to physicians. Nurses far outnumber all other groups of health workers, with an estimated 12 million nurses working worldwide. Women constitute the overwhelming majority of nurses, with estimates ranging from 89 to 97 percent in countries of the global north. According to the 2003 American Nurses Association Social Policy Statement, “nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities, and population.”

To achieve this range of activities, nurses operate in four domains: clinical or bedside practice (the work most commonly associated with nursing in the public imagination), nursing management, nursing education, and nursing research. Nurses work in a variety of hospital-based and community settings and in many capacities: in clinics as nurse practitioners, in colleges and universities as faculty educators and researchers, in government as policy makers, in schools as public health nurses, in hospitals as administrators and clinical nurse specialists, and in the home caring for a child with a disability or a senior recovering from a stroke.

Nurses are highly educated, skilled practitioners of the art and science of nursing who contribute to individual and community health and well being, the domestic economy, and the reproduction of community values. Despite this, nurses continue to be variously misrepresented in the popular media and on the Internet as angels of mercy, doctors' handmaidens, glorified waitresses, and “naughty girls.” Nursing as care work and individual and collective identity illustrate well the gendered, classed, and raced meanings of women's lives.

History of Nursing

Nursing dates to the mid-1800s, although women's work as healers, herbalists, and midwives predates the professionalization of care work. Florence Nightingale, who was born into a wealthy British family, wrote about being “called” to nursing. Known as the “Lady with the Lamp” in recognition of her service to injured and dying soldiers during the Crimean War and elsewhere, she established the first professional nursing school in London in 1860.

Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-born woman of color who, like Florence Nightingale, traveled widely to care for populations hard hit by cholera and other epidemics and to serve for three years during the Crimean War. Unlike Nightingale, Seacole's contributions to nursing practice were largely forgotten. Some historians and feminists claim she fell into obscurity because race and class prejudice made Seacole a less fitting role model during the Victorian era. When Seacole's contributions were rediscovered, she became a symbol for minoritized nurses and the civil rights movement.

Until the mid-1950s, women learned the knowledge and skills that prepared them to be a nurse through apprenticeship. Their training typically occurred in a hospital setting under the watchful eye of a physician or senior nurse. The naturalness of these expectations was reinforced by educational institutions and religious-based hospitals, that trained nurses. Schools of nursing operated by Catholic and Mormon churches, for instance, reinforced ...