In this post‐9/11 era marked by religious and ethnic conflicts and the rise of cultural intolerance, ambiguities arising from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism jeopardize the delivery of culturally safe nursing care to non‐Western populations. This new social reality requires nurses to develop a heightened awareness of health issues pertaining to racism and ethnocentrism to provide culturally safe care to non‐Western immigrants or refugees. Through the lens of post‐colonial feminism, this paper explores the challenge of providing culturally (...) safe nursing care in the context of the post‐9/11 in Canadian healthcare settings. A critical appraisal of the literature demonstrates that post‐colonial feminism, despite some limitations, remains a valuable theoretical perspective to apply in cultural nursing research and develop culturally safe nursing practice. Post‐colonial feminism offers the analytical lens to understand how health, social and cultural context, race and gender intersect to impact on non‐Western populations’ health. However, an uncritical application of post‐colonial feminism may not serve racialized men's and women's interests because of its essentialist risk. Post‐colonial feminism must expand its epistemological assumptions to integrate Taylor's concept of identity and recognition and Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and unfinalizability to explore non‐Western populations’ health issues and the context of nursing practice. This would strengthen the theoretical adequacy of post‐colonial feminist approaches in unveiling the process of racialization that arises from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism in Western healthcare settings. (shrink)

BURGESS J and PURKIS ME. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 297–308 The power and politics of collaboration in nurse practitioner role developmentThis health services study employed participatory action research to engage nurse practitioners (NPs) from two health authorities in British Columbia, Canada, to examine the research question: How does collaboration advance NP role integration within primary health‐care? The inquiry was significant and timely because the NP role was recently introduced into the province, supported by passage of legislation and regulation and introduction (...) of graduate education programs. In separate and concurrent inquiry groups, the NPs discussed their practice patterns, role development progress and understanding of collaboration and role integration. The inquiry revealed the political nature of the NP role and the extent to which NPs relied on collaborative relations at all levels of the health system to advance role integration. Given that NP role development is still at an early stage in this province, as well as other provinces in Canada, this study provides important insights into the power and politics of role development, and offers direction for future role advancement. (shrink)

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are increasingly called on to provide high‐quality health‐care particularly for people who face significant barriers to accessing services. Although discourses of social justice have become relatively common in nursing and health services literature, critical analyses of how NP roles articulate with social justice issues have received less attention. In this study, we examine the role of NPs from a critical social justice perspective. A critical social justice lens raises morally significant questions, for example, why certain individuals and (...) groups bear a disproportionate burden of illness and suffering; what social conditions contribute to disparities in health and social status; and what social mandate NPs ought to develop in response to these realities. In our analysis, we draw on lessons learned from the initial Canadian experience with the introduction of NPs in the 1970s to consider the renewed and burgeoning interest in NPs in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. As we argue, a critical social justice perspective (in addition to the biomedical foci of NP practice) will be essential to sustaining long‐term, socially responsive NP roles and achieving greater equity in health and health‐care. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the various discourses, particularly the dominant instrumental and economic discourses that have brought the phenomena of the nurse practitioner into being. It is proposed that NPs have been constituted as an object of nature and therefore understood metaphorically as a tool or instrument within the health care system to be used efficiently and effectively. Heidegger's philosophical analysis of the question concerning technology is used to argue that our current ways of knowing the (...) NP through these discourses, with their emphasis on calculative logic, have resulted from our modern view of the essence of technology. It is also argued that there is now a need to shape our horizons concerning the NP in new and different ways. There is a need to engage in dialogical forms of research in order to evoke the richness and depth of what it means to be an NP, that is, to reveal the other modes of expression by which we define ourselves, understand others and nursing. (shrink)