Gender And The Professional Predicament in Nursing - Softcover

Davies, Celia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0335194028 ISBN 13: 9780335194025

Publisher: Open University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Gender and the Professional Predicament in Nursing examines the ways in which our understanding of nursing is gendered, and how our notion of nursing is connected to our idea of what it is to be a woman. It explores the implications this connection has for the status of nursing as a profession, and re-examines some of the fundamental questions that the nursing profession has tried to address, such as: what is nursing care?; who should do it? and why is it so difficult to manage the provision of nursing care?
Gender and the Professional Predicament in Nursing demonstrates that once nurses try to define and shape the nature of their work they are marginalized or silenced. Frequent descriptions of them as 'sentimental', 'divided' or 'incompetent' highlight the need to understand nurses' exclusion from policy debates, and why their voices are so seldom heard.
Celia Davies contends that in a society divided by gender, defining nursing as women's work is deeply contradictory. We value nurses but devalue nursing. She suggests that alongside the debates about managerial efficiency in the NHS we need another kind of debate about how we organize health and social care, about what we mean by professionalism and about the worth of caring work.
This book is important reading for students of women's studies, nursing, allied professions in health and medicine, policy makers and human resource managers.

About this title

About the Author

Celia Daviesis professor emeriti of health care at the Open University.

Review

"This is a book for nurses about nursing. It is about the emotion, the contradictions, the disappointments, the disarray. If we can identify, discuss, tolerate our conflicts and uncertainties - which this book helps us do - something is happening." - Sociology and Nurse Education Network (Generation of PM publication page100) "I believe this book will generate a necessary reflection about nursing in general, in all its forms, and the role that the nurse should play within the new NHS." - Health Visitor "...its wider significance is the convincing case it makes for seeing the professional predicament of nursing as a central problem that must be solved if we are to create a health service to meet everyone's needs." - British Medical Journal "Celia Davies' book will play a crucial role since it offers both a theoretically informed and policy related analysis of the professional predicament of nursing in the NHS - Journal of Social Policy Celia Davies presents a well structured, extensively referencedanalysis of the development of nursing in relation to both practice and policy arenas and the way in which, to date, this development has been influenced fundamentally by gender issues...this book will undoubtedly be an asset to personal bookshelves, as well as essential readingmaterial for degree study programmes on college library shelves." - Women in Management Review "...of interest and relevance to all those concerned with the future of nursing as an occupation and hence wider issues of health care provision. It is alsouseful for those concerned with theoretical issues regarding gender and employment and makes an important contributionto the sociology of the professions." - Journal of Gender Studies "I strongly recommend all those wishing to mountan effective challenge to both the theory and practice of male dominated welfare organisations to read this scholarly yet innovative and exciting book." - Health Care Analysis "An important demonstration of the masculinity of NHS organizational life, despite the numerical predominanceof women." - Change "...a valuable, ground-breaking contribution to literature on gender and nursing within theUK." - International History of Nursing Journal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Open University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0335194028
• ISBN 13: 9780335194025
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 234