Nursing inquiry
-
Review
Cultivating the power of partnerships in feminist participatory action research in women's health.
Feminist participatory action research integrates feminist theories and participatory action research methods, often with the explicit intention of building community-academic partnerships to create new forms of knowledge to inform women's health. Despite the current pro-partnership agenda in health research and policy settings, a lack of attention has been paid to how to cultivate effective partnerships given limited resources, competing agendas, and inherent power differences. ⋯ We then offer skills and resources needed by academic researchers to effectively harness the collective resources, agendas, and knowledge that each partner brings to the table. We suggest that investing in the process of cultivating power-with research partnerships ultimately improves our collective ability to understand and address women's health issues.
-
Reducing health inequities is a priority issue in Canada and worldwide. In this paper, we argue that nursing has a clear mandate to ensure access to health and health-care by providing sensitive empowering care to those experiencing inequities and working to change underlying social conditions that result in and perpetuate health inequities. ⋯ Numerous societal barriers as well as constraints within the nursing profession must be acknowledged and addressed. We offer recommendations related to nursing practice, education and research to move forward the agenda of reducing health inequities through action on the social determinants of health.
-
Recently, schools of nursing have adopted the use of high-fidelity human patient simulators in laboratory settings to teach nursing. Although numerous articles document the benefits of teaching undergraduate nursing students in this way, little attention has been paid to the discourses and texts organizing this approach. This institutional ethnography uses the critical feminist sociology of Dorothy E. ⋯ The research shows how discourses rationalize and sustain certain processes at the expense of others. For example, ruling discourses such as biomedicine, efficiency, and the relational ontology are activated to construct the simulation lab as part of nursing and nursing education. The analysis also highlights the intended and unintended effects of these discourses on nursing education and discusses how emphasizing nursing knowledges can make the simulation lab a positive place for learning.
-
Nurse practitioners (NPs) are increasingly called on to provide high-quality health-care particularly for people who face significant barriers to accessing services. Although discourses of social justice have become relatively common in nursing and health services literature, critical analyses of how NP roles articulate with social justice issues have received less attention. ⋯ In our analysis, we draw on lessons learned from the initial Canadian experience with the introduction of NPs in the 1970s to consider the renewed and burgeoning interest in NPs in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. As we argue, a critical social justice perspective (in addition to the biomedical foci of NP practice) will be essential to sustaining long-term, socially responsive NP roles and achieving greater equity in health and health-care.
-
Acute care nurse practitioner roles have been introduced in many countries. The acute care nurse practitioner provides nursing and medical care to meet the complex needs of patients and their families using a holistic, health-centred approach. There are many pressures to adopt a performance framework and execute activities and tasks. ⋯ Praxis influences how relationships are structured with patients, families and colleagues in the work setting. Decision-makers at different levels need to recognize the contribution of praxis in the full development of the acute care nurse practitioner role. Different strategies can be used by educators to assist students and practitioners to develop a praxis framework.