Nursing and feminism: An uneasy alliance

Cassandra and A Room of One's Own: A common cry of frustration

In this manuscript, we explore the connections between Florence Nightingale's Cassandra and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own while taking the authors' personal and social contexts into account. We conduct a detailed textual analysis from a feminist perspective. Cassandra and A Room of One's Own exhibit singular textual commonalities, such as evidence of trauma, the integration of myth and fiction as literary devices aimed at facilitating the author's access to various social spheres, the use of interpellations to impact the audience, and an argument for education as a path by which privileged women can enter the public realm. Both authors' personal wounds and intellectual frustrations influenced their work, thus making their writing very powerful.

Gender and Empowerment by Nursing Students: Representations, Discourses and Perspectives

Nursing history is marked by stigmas of gender, race and class. Nowadays, this scenario is evidenced by the social disqualification of the profession and biomedical and male supremacy. Nevertheless, the profession has the potential to change this paradigm with an intersectional approach. The current study aims to understand how the relationships of gender, feminism and empowerment are experienced by nursing students at a Brazilian public university. This is a qualitative study, exploratory-explanatory, with the application of interviews with nursing students in their five years of training. The chosen method of analysis was the Discourse of the Collective Subject based on the central ideas categorized after the interviews: (a) Profession-female and stigmatized due to its historical construction influenced by religiosity and moral; (b) Formation-far from gender relations by the perpetuation of stereotypes; and (c) Perspectives-empowerment of the profession if close to the feminist movement. The students' discourse alert to the historical reflexes of oppressive ideological mechanisms of women and nursing in their ongoing professional training, claiming transversal learning spaces for the critical expansion of gender awareness and consequent empowerment of nursing in a feminist and intersectional perspective.

Experiences and perceptions of male nursing students in a single-sex class: A qualitative descriptive study

The shortage of human resources in nursing is a global challenge, and males may play an important role in alleviating this shortage, especially in China. Just as single-sex education has a potentially positive impact on women in male-dominated professions, it may also have the same impact on men in nursing, which may promote male engagement in nursing. This study delved into the experiences and perceptions that are peculiar to male nursing students in a single-sex class. A qualitative, descriptive design was employed using conventional content analysis. A purposive sample of 12 male nursing students in a male-only class of a university in China participated. Individual semi-structured interviews were performed between January and March 2019. Data analysis revealed five themes. Considering the negative peer influence and potential communication barriers of a male-only nursing class, establishing a male nursing student alliance instead of a male-only nursing class may be a better choice. In Asian culture, reconstructing the current social norms of gender is crucial to eliminating prejudice and male dividends and changing the definitions of masculinity, all of which are conducive to the development of male involvement in nursing.

#Nursing Now

Nurses are the largest group in the global health workforce, but due to social, political, and gender inequality, traditionally their role has been undervalued. Nursing Now is a 3-year campaign which aims to empower nurses worldwide by building grassroots support to demand better investment in nursing and midwifery to tackle 21st-century health challenges.

The role of universities in attracting male students on to pre-registration nursing programmes: An electronic survey of UK higher education institutions

The UK nursing workforce is facing a crisis. More nurses are leaving than entering the profession, and there are tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies. Political factors are having a significant impact on numbers, in particular the decision to withdraw bursaries for nursing undergraduates, and a steep decline in EU nurses registering to work in the UK post-Brexit. Against this backdrop, there is a stark gender imbalance in the workforce, with only around 11% of registered nurses being male. We surveyed UK higher education institutions to try to identify whether the gendered nature of nursing was considered a concern and whether steps were being taken to address it. We sent an electronic survey to every UK university offering undergraduate nurse training validated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). With a response rate of 42%, the majority of respondents felt that nursing departments should take much more responsibility to increase the proportion of male nurses entering the nursing profession. More needs to be done to diversify the workforce and make nursing an appealing career choice for men and women.

Nursing professionalization and welfare state policies: A critical review of structural factors influencing the development of nursing and the nursing workforce

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country-level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill-level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings.

Self-employed nurses as change agents in healthcare: strategies, consequences, and possibilities

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to report on ethnographic research that investigated how self-employed nurses perceive the contemporary healthcare field, what attributes they possess that facilitate their roles as change agents, what strategies they use to influence change, and what consequences they face for their actions, thus contributing to what is known about organizational change in institutionalized settings such as healthcare.

Design/methodology/approach

– Focussed ethnography was used to explore self-employed nurses’ work experiences and elucidate the cultural elements of their social contexts, including customs, ideologies, beliefs, and knowledge and the ways that these impact upon the possibilities for change in the system.

Findings

– These self-employed nurses reflected on the shortcomings in the healthcare system and took entrepreneurial risks that would allow them to practice nursing according to their professional values. They used a number of strategies to influence change such as capitalizing on opportunities, preparing themselves for innovative work, managing and expanding the scope of nursing practice, and building new ideas on foundational nursing knowledge and experience. They had high job satisfaction and a strong sense of contribution but they faced significant resistance because of their non-traditional approach to nursing practice.

Originality/value

– Despite dramatic restructuring in the Canadian healthcare system, the system remains physician-centered and hospital-based. Nursing ' s professional potential has been largely untapped in any change efforts. Self-employed nurses have positioned themselves to deliver care based on nursing values and to promote alternative conceptions of health and healthcare. This study offers a rare exploration of this unique form of nursing practice and its potential to influence health system reform.

Critical perspectives in the study of nursing work

PURPOSE

The purpose of this article is to critique extant nursing research on nursing practice environments by juxtaposing it with critical sociological perspectives on nurses' work and to propose an alternative paradigm for future research based on these perspectives.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

The extant nursing/health services research on nursing practice environments is reviewed. Sociological concepts are introduced, expanded on, and linked to the variables measured in the nursing literature.

FINDINGS

The substantial body of nursing research about nurses' job satisfaction has been targeted to management concerns and has taken the positivistic perspective that is traditional in organizational research. However, attempts to address nurses' working situations using expedient solutions obscure any consideration of underlying influencers. Several well-developed sociological concepts pertaining to gender, knowledge, professionalization, and organizations have direct relevance for the study of nurses' work and can provide new perspectives for deeper questioning about nurses' work experiences.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

Unprecedented organizational restructuring in health care has had a profound impact on the practice of nursing, prompting health system administrators and nursing researchers to study the consequences of system change and devise solutions. This paper presents a discussion of typically disconnected perspectives in the study of work (management and sociological) in order to reframe what is known about the factors influencing the quality of nurses' working lives and to provide a conceptual foundation for deeper and more critical research about nurses' work.