Nurse Empowerment: "Now" Is Always The Time

Nurses have a long history of being significantly disempowered. Historically, nurses served as "handmaidens" to all-mighty physicians, running at doctors' beck and call. The role of the nurse has changed over the years, but we nurses still need to feel empowered to fulfill the promise of our profession.During the twentieth century, many important factors served to empower nurses (the majority of whom were women) to come into their own. The rise of feminism in the 1960s was a crucial salvo that began to break down societal barriers for women. The subsequent emergence of so-called "Third-Wave Feminism" in the latter decades of the twentieth century was a more recent manifestation of women seizing the cultural power that was their natural birthright (but often out of reach due to long-standing patriarchal structures.)Nursing Science, Literature and Research Another manifestation of nursing's rise to its own empowerment came in the form of a growing body of nursing science, research and literature. With nurses conducting their own research and creating a body of solid scientific and academic literature from which to draw inspiration for further development, nursing moved from being simply an "art of caring" to a science, complete with our own codification of nursing diagnoses and rigorous reflection on our collective practices as clinicians.The nursing process itself is an example of how nursing behaviors in the clinical setting were transformed from a simple task-oriented vocati...
Source: Digital Doorway - Category: Nurses Tags: nursing nurses medical care healthcare healthcare delivery healthcare economics medicine Source Type: blogs