Resumen de Standing on their own two feet. The role of nursing education in the life stories of nurse teachers from bangladesh
The nursing profession in Bangladesh has undergone substantial development over recent decades but still faces significant challenges. A remarkable gap has been described between the institutionally-accepted image of nursing as the provision of hands-on care and the small amount of time that nurses allocate to it, especially in government hospitals. The reasons for this contradiction have shown a complex interaction between historical, socioeconomic and cultural factors. These are mainly related to the conflict between the British-inherited curriculum, with a strong emphasis on basic care activities, social and gender norms, and longstanding discrimination against nurses in their institutional settings and society.
This research aims to provide a theoretical analysis of the ways in which structural factors intersect with the professional and social experiences of a group of nurse teachers. The objectives of the thesis are to describe nurses’ views about nursing care and their profession, to discuss to what extent nursing education has been an empowering tool, and to analyse how the nurses’ socioeconomic background, personal experiences and life events have influenced their professional careers and their conceptualisation of nursing and care.
A critical phenomenological analysis of the nurses’ life stories has been used, relating the stories to the broader history and political economy of nursing in Bangladesh. Twenty-two nurses were selected and interviewed over an eight-month fieldwork period, of which seven were selected as key informants. The discussion is mainly based on theoretical contributions from anthropology, practice theory, feminism and a critical analysis of nursing knowledge.
A common rhetoric was found among the nurses: namely that nursing care has ‘deteriorated’. They tended to emphasise hands-on care and the ‘old’ apprenticeship model, while also approving moves towards a more professional model. Nursing care activities were understood as a mixture of service and management of the wards and patients, linked to a wish to ‘utilise’ the knowledge that they were continuously acquiring. Therefore, nursing education was broadly empowering in terms of knowledge, independence, and self-realization. Nevertheless, at some moments social and institutional discrimination made the m feel disempowered, frustrated and vulnerable. Even so, the nurses interviewed have achieved successful professional careers, together with a significant amount of social recognition. Without ignoring their outstanding individual capacities, the role that key people and institutions had in supporting them in their eagerness to learn has to be considered. Finally, the act of caring itself and the knowledge that it produces may also be a source of personal and collective agency. However, work is needed in order to create and maintain the necessary conditions for the caring experience to be empowering. This responsibility falls beyond the nursing field, as it involves structural changes, especially in terms of gender and class inequalities.
