8.3.3 Constructing care: The contested territory of nursing older people (340)

Deborah Humphrey, Practice Development/ Lead Nurse Older people's mental health, Older peoples mental health service, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire mental health partnership Trust, Oxford, United Kingdom deborah.humphrey@obmh.nhs.uk

Abstract:

This paper presents some of the methodological issues that have arisen during my PhD study into the historical and contemporary issues that have influenced the status of nursing in older people’s health services. Using discourse analysis methodology I have analysed a popular nursing journal, nursing text books and policy to examine the continuities, shifts, silences and representations within the discourse surrounding nursing in older peoples care. Nursing texts are an important means of socialising people in to the nursing profession and as such are an important primary source. Within this study the approach to texts has yielded several interesting findings. It has offered an insight in to a cultural inheritance that underpins certain areas of nursing in older peoples services, it has demonstrated how texts over time have given mixed messages about nursing older people and finally it has shown how the position of nurses working with older people has become a contested territory dependent upon the direction of health policy. This has led to some difficulty in clearly articulating nurse’s specialist contribution to older people’s health care. As a methodological approach discourse analysis challenges the taken for granted narratives in texts and recognises that multiple truths may exist. Therefore, working within a framework of discourse analysis it is the aim to search for implicit assumptions within the text and to make the implicit explicit. Thus, this approach is ideal for looking at nursing in older people’s services, which has been subject to many professional assumptions that have impacted on areas such as recruitment and professional development. In the paper I will present some of the data from my study to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of a discourse analysis of nursing texts as a methodological approach within nursing research.

Biography:

Deborah Humphrey Practice Development/Lead Nurse Older People's Mental Health Services. Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Mental health Partnership Trust PhD Student History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University. I have a professional background in older people's service in both nurse education and in practice. I am particularly interested in how nurses working in such services develp their practice and articulate their skills.