Closing thoughts on hidden agendas – an epilogue

Can professional nursing value claims be refused? Might nursing values be accepted provisionally and tentatively?

“…Rightly or wrongly, helpfully or unhelpfully, many of those who speak about and for nurses define nursing as a profession that, at its core, is an ethical enterprise or undertaking (see, e.g., Jolley & Brykczyńska, 1993). Proposing that nursing values can be refused or held provisionally and tentatively is thus knowingly provocative, and it is not anticipated that readers will agree with what is argued.…”

Applying a Foucauldian lens to the Canadian code of ethics for registered nurses as a discursive mechanism for nurses professional identity

“…Within a masculine empirical hegemony, medicine and hospitals became the organizing structures for people's health, and nursing emerged as an occupation that could improve populations' health (Fowler, 2020; Jolley, 2020). Nursing was first organized as an occupation by wealthy women in the Victorian era, through the military caring for wounded soldiers on the battlefields as enlisted soldiers, and within the religious orders (Gregory et al, 2015).…”

“…Nursing was first organized as an occupation by wealthy women in the Victorian era, through the military caring for wounded soldiers on the battlefields as enlisted soldiers, and within the religious orders (Gregory et al, 2015). The view of a woman heroine caring for the sick was valued since the Crimea war had recently ended, and medical advances were happening, which raised the need for more skilled nursing care (Jolley, 2020).…”

“…Historically nursing attempted to gain agency as a profession by aligning with medicine (Franco & Tavares, 2013; Jolley, 2020), subjugating nursing because medicine already occupies that space. Perhaps this first Canadian nursing code of ethics was Sr. Simone's attempt to define nursing practice as separate from medicine and rooted in its own theory of caring.…”