Nurse practitioners (NPs), as advanced practice nurses, have evolved over the years to become recognized as an important and growing trend in Canada and worldwide. In spite of sound evidence as to the effectiveness ofNPs in primary care and other care settings, role implementation and integration continue to pose significant challenges. This article utilizes postcolonial theory, as articulated by Homi Bhabha, to examine and challenge traditional ideologies and structures that have shaped the development, implementation and integration of theNProle to this (...) day. Specifically, we utilize Bhabha's concepts of third space, hybridity, identity and agency in order to further conceptualize the nurse practitioner role, to examine how the role challenges some of the inherent assumptions within the healthcare system and to explore how development of each to these concepts may prove useful in integration of nurse practitioners within the healthcare system. Our analysis casts light on the importance of a broader, power structure analysis and illustrates how colonial assumptions operating within our current healthcare system entrench, expand and re‐invent, as well as mask the structures and practices that serve to impede nurse practitioner full integration and contributions. Suggestions are made for future analysis and research. (shrink)

Positioned within a hybrid of the human and technology, professional nursing practice has always occupied a space that is more than human. In nursing education, technology is central in providing tools with which practice knowledge is mobilized so that students can safely engage with simulated human patients without causing harm to real people. However, while there is an increased emphasis on deploying these simulated humans as emissaries from person‐centred care to demonstrate what it is like to care for real humans, (...) the nature of what is really going on in simulation—what is real and what is simulated—is very rarely discussed and poorly understood. This paper explores how elements of postcolonial critical thought can aid in understanding the challenges of educating nurses to provide person‐centred care within a healthcare culture that is increasingly reliant on technology. Because nursing education is itself a hybrid of real and simulated practice, it provides an appropriate case study to explore the philosophical question of technology in healthcare discourse, particularly as it relates to the relationship between the human patient and its uncanny simulated double. Drawing on postcolonial elements such as the uncanny, diaspora, hybridity, and créolité, the hybrid conditions of nursing education are examined in order to open up new possibilities of thinking about how learning to care is entangled with this technological space to assist in shaping professional knowledge of person‐centred care. Considering these issues through a postcolonial lens opens up questions about the nature of the difficulty in using simulated human technologies in clinical education, particularly with the paradoxical aim of providing person‐centred care within a climate that increasingly characterized as posthuman. (shrink)

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations in the United States continue to experience overall health inequity, despite significant improvement in health status for nearly all other racial‐ethnic groups over the past 30 years. Nurses comprise the bulk of healthcare providers in the U.S. and are in an optimal position to improve AI/AN health by transforming both nursing education and practice. This potential is dependent, however, on nurses’ ability to recognize the distinct historical and political conditions through which AI/AN health inequities have (...) been produced and sustained. Nurse providers, educators, and leaders must in turn recognize how the sustained conditions of marginalization and expropriation that underpin current AI/AN health inequities continue to shape contemporary AI/AN health outcomes. This manuscript builds upon the extant literature of AI/AN historical health policy and utilizes decolonial theorizations of nursing and a cultural safety framework to propose a series of immediately actionable steps for nursing intervention into AI/AN health inequity. Ultimately, we suggest that it is crucial for nurses to collaborate with AI/AN individuals and communities across educational and clinical settings to further refine these approaches in alignment with the disciplinary obligation of promoting social justice within healthcare. (shrink)