This article examines field studies of nursing work published in the English language between 1993 and 2003 as the first step towards an empirically based reformulation of the nursing mandate. A decade of ethnographic research reveals that, contrary to contemporary theories which promote an image of nursing work centred on individualised unmediated caring relationships, in real‐life practice the core nursing contribution is that of the healthcare mediator. Eight bundles of activity that comprise this intermediary role are described utilising evidence from (...) the literature. The mismatch between nursing's culture and ideals and the structure and constraints of the work setting is a chronic source of practitioner dissatisfaction. It is argued that the profession has little to gain by pursuing an agenda of holistic patient care centred on emotional intimacy and that an alternative occupational mandate focused on the healthcare mediator function might make for more humane health services and a more viable professional future. (shrink)

Nurses make an important contribution to the organisation and coordination of patient care but receive little formal educational preparation for this work. This paper builds on Allen's care trajectory management framework to specify evidence‐based and theoretically informed competencies for this component of the nursing role and proposes how these might be incorporated into nursing curricula. This is necessary so that at the point of registration nurses have the expertise to realise their potential as both providers and organisers of patient care (...) and are better able to articulate and develop this aspect of nursing practice. (shrink)

‘I’ll tell you what suits me best if you don’t mind me saying’: ‘lay participation’ in health‐careIncreasing ‘lay participation’ in healthcare has become a popular notion in recent years and is generally considered to be a good thing in both nursing and wider policy circles. Yet despite the widespread acceptance of this overall idea, there is a dearth of theorising in this area. This has resulted in a lack of conceptual clarity which has not only hamstrung the development of empirical (...) work in the field, but has also led to a tendency by both nurses and policy‐makers to assume that greater ‘lay participation’ in health will lead to a concomitant increase in lay power vis‐à‐vis health professionals. The data presented in this paper indicate that this is, at best, an over‐simplistic assumption and, at worst, an erroneous one. Drawing on sociological theories of the division of labour, I suggest that one way in which we might begin to clarify our thinking in this area is by differentiating between the ‘role’ and ‘task’ components of ‘lay participation’. I illustrate my argument with reference to two separate ethnographic studies undertaken between 1994 and 1998 in which participation at the level of the individual was examined. (shrink)