Colloque

Foreseeing the future of nursing knowledge

Jocalyn Lawler

Membre a labase

Jocalyn Lawler

Résumé du colloque

I would want to address this topic in relation to the wider issues arising from the explosion in knowledge making and the means by which knowledge can now be accessed - at least electronically. At the moment nurses are struggling with increasing pressure to make their knowledge both scientific and transparent so that the managers and health economists can use it for organisational and commercial purposes; but this is set against the growing strength of nursing research which seeks out humans understandings of their experiences. The former pressure arises most directly from the USA and increasingly global commercial interests in health care; the latter has its origins in nurse researchers wanting to understand more of what is happening to "real" people. As I see it, there are two opposing intellectual and epistemological pressures; first those that stem from globalisation in its economic sense and which is a kind of end stage capitalism, and the second comes from the intellectual trends of the postmodern period where the French have been most influential. A third, and so far, not so strong an influence on health care is the impact of the information age which makes more knowledge available to more people and this undermines those groups, such as medicine, that have benefited from limited access to medical knowledge. The question which I would want to explore is how nursing will find a place in the new century that will see its knowledge, professional culture and practice more highly valued and respected. I think the next century (starting 2001) will be good for nursing and I am very optimistic about that.