Consensus methods are poorly standardized and inconsistently used in medical education research. Improved criteria for reporting are needed.

The findings of this study are concerning if interpreted within the context of the structural critiques because our findings lend support to these critiques. If consensus methods should continue being used to inform best practices in nursing education, they must be rigorous in design.

Competency has become a key concept in education in general over the last four decades. This article examines the development of the competency-based movement with a particular focus on the significance it has had for nursing education. Our hypothesis is that the competency movement can only adequately be understood if it is analyzed in relation to the broad societal transformation of the last decades-often summarized under the catchword neoliberalism-and with it the emergence of managerial models for Human Resource Management (HRM) for the reorganization of social services. Classical professions, which were characterized under welfarism by an esoteric knowledge based on ethical norms, have now become marketable commodities that can be evaluated in the same way as other commodities. We want to underline that while this development is still under way, it is the concept of competency that was the decisive political instrument enabling this profound change. With the widespread implementation of competency-based education that now governs nursing knowledge, the development of a critical, oppositional perspective becomes more challenging, if not entirely impossible. We will be focusing primarily on nursing education in Canada, although we maintain that it has relevance for nursing internationally.

Recent events such as the COVID 19 pandemic and racist police violence have contributed to a heightened awareness about the nature and origin of health care disparities. Nurses are portrayed as heroes while expected to work with no equipment, and nursing organizations release antiracist statements, while little is done to address the underlying conditions that cause disparities. In this paper, we engage with ideas from The Invisible Committee and other theorists to suggest that nursing needs to develop new ways of thinking about both its past and its present politics if any chance of a radical new future is possible.

During the Nazi regime (1933-1945), more than 300,000 psychiatric patients were killed. The well-calculated killing of chronic mentally 'ill' patients was part of a huge biopolitical program of well-established scientific, eugenic standards of the time. Among the medical personnel implicated in these assassinations were nurses, who carried out this program through their everyday practice. However, newer research raises suspicions that psychiatric patients were being assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, which, I hypothesize, implies that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. An investigation of the impact of the interplay between the notes left by nurses and those by psychiatrists illustrates the active role of the psychiatric medical record in the killing of these patients. Using theoretical insights from Michel Foucault and philosopher Giorgio Agamben and analyzing one part of a particularly rich patient file found in the Langenhorn Psychiatric Asylum in the city of Hamburg, I demonstrate the role of the record in both constructing and deconstructing patient subjectivities. De-subjectifying patients condemned them to specific zones in the asylum within which they were reduced to their 'bare life'--a precondition for their physical assassination.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the readers in a theoretical reflection on nursing practices in forensic psychiatric settings. In this paper, we argue that practices of exclusion in forensic psychiatric settings share some common ground with Agamben's description of sovereign power and, consequently, the possible creation of zones of exception in this environment. The concept of exception is, therefore, purposely used to shift our thinking, highlight the political forces surrounding exclusionary practices in forensic psychiatric nursing, and explore the ethical tensions that arise for nurses who become entangled in the control of these zones of exception. We argue that ethical and political discussions regarding this phenomenon are necessary if we wish to further understand the complexities of this field of practice and promote constructive change.

These days, discussions of what might be the 'essence' or the 'core' of nursing and nursing practice sooner or later end in a discussion about the concept of care. Most of the 'newer' nursing theories use this concept as a theoretical core concept. Even though these theoretical approaches use the concept of care with very different philosophical foundations and theoretical consistency, they concur in defining care as the essence of nursing and thereby glorify goodness as the decisive characteristic of nursing. These theoretical approaches neglect the fact that nursing is above all a profession with a societal task and is characterized by an asymmetrical power relation between nurses and their patients. Based on the results of a research project that analysed the role nurses played in the killing of psychiatric patients in Germany during the Nazi regime, I demonstrate that an approach based on the concept of care is not able to explain how nurses were able to commit crimes of such atrocity. These crimes were bound to an emotional investment that sustained the production of 'life unworthy of living'. In the case of nurses under the Nazi regime, certainly a kind of sadism was at issue that can only be explained if we recognize that the social bond is characterized by a certain tension; 'goodness' that caring theories assign to the social bond always coexists with the capacity for destruction. Using the Foucauldian theoretical framework of biopower and biopolitics enables one to analyse violence and power as integral parts of nurses' practice. Seen from this perspective, the killing of patients was part of a biopolitical programme and not a relapse into barbarism. The concept of care obscures the political agenda of nursing and does not provide a critical and political framework to analysing nursing practice.

Mainstream nursing history often positions itself in opposition to philosophy and many nursing historians are reticent of theorizing. In the quest to illuminate the lives of nurses and women current historical approaches are driven by reformist aspirations but are based on the conception that nursing or caring is basically good and the timelessness of universal values. This has the effect of essentialising political categories of identity such as class, race and gender. This kind of history is about affirmation rather than friction and about the conservation of memory and musealization. In contrast, we will focus on how we imagine nursing history could be used as a philosophical, critical perspective to challenge the ongoing transformations of our societies. Existing reality must be confronted with strangeness and the historically different can assume the function of this counterpart, meaning present and past must continuously be set in relation to each other. Thus, critical history is always the history of the present but not merely the pre-history of the present - critique must rather present different realities and different certainties. In this paper, we use this approach to discuss the implementation of the nursing process (NP) in Germany. The nursing process appears to be a technology that helped to set up an infrastructure - or assemblage - to transform nursing interventions into a commodity exchangable between consumers and nurses in a free market. In our theoretical perspective, we argue that NP was a step in the realization of the German ordoliberal program, a specific variety of neoliberalism. In order to implement market-orientation in the healthcare system it was necessary to transform hospitals into calculable spaces and to make all performances in the hospital calculable. This radically transformed not just the systems, but the ways in which nurses and patients conveived of themselves.