Braided identities in acute care nurses' practices of work: professional, clinician, employee

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how dispositions of nursing habitus carry shift handover into practice in acute care.Design/methodology/approachHandover (the exchange of information by nurses between shifts) is more recently purported to be a procedure that transfers the responsibility of and accountability for care to maintain patient safety. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice as lens, this paper examines data from an ethnographic study of nurses' work in acute care to reveal what happens in and around nurses' practices of handover.FindingsExploring handover as a practice enables identification of nurses' responsibilities of work as professional, clinician and employee. These responsibilities are not practised separately, rather, as braided identities they are embodied into nurses' practices of work. Nurses' clinician and employee identities address the clinical and organisationally relevant material contained in handover, but it is in the ways that nurses embody their responses that their professional identity becomes evident.Research limitations/implicationsViewing handover as a procedure suggests that nurses are rule followers and/or sole players and conceptualises nurses as individualised professionals only. This received knowledge as doxa misrecognises the centrality of connectedness between nurses in their work in the acute care setting.Originality/valueRecognising nurses' braided workplace identities as being professional, clinician and employee upends the doxa of nurses work as tasks and roles in the delivery of healthcare in the acute care setting.

“That's not a proper ethnography”: a hybrid “propportune” ethnography to study nurses' perceptions of organisational culture in a British hospital

“…These transitions across boundaries, whilst challenging, provide opportunities to gain advantages of pre-understanding as well as address criticisms of being native. This incorporation of different identities and responsibilities is similar to Lake et al . 's (2023) concept of braided identities, where nurses are professionals, clinicians and employees.…”

“…In this vignette, the student acknowledges that she had been a nurse in that hospital, so she knew nursing and she knew the building. This earlier experience of being an “insider” suggests some nativeness; yet, she had been away for 10 years, pursuing academic studies and contemplating becoming an academic, perhaps now judged an “outsider.” We further contribute to the insider/outsider debate by nuancing the student ethnographer's experience (Rosales, 2021) in these fluid (Bruskin, 2019), social (Lake et al ., 2023) and fluctuating (Gosovic, 2018) identities. Here the student reveals how she is working the hyphens (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, 2013) and attempting to negotiate these supposed either-or roles, such as insider-outsider, overt-covert, nurse-academic and even home-field (Günel et al.…”

Implementasi Form Pendokumentasian SBAR terhadap Komunikasi Perawat saat Serah Terima Pasien

“…Serah terima merupakan suatu prosedur pengalihan atau transfer tanggung jawab dan akuntabilitas perawatan untuk menjaga keselamatan pasien (Lake et al, 2022). Metode SBAR dapat meningkatkan keterampilan komunikasi perawat dan mengurangi jumlah interupsi, sehingga berdampak terhadap peningkatan kualitas serah terima pasien di samping tempat tidur (Monti et al,, 2022).…”