Learning from the Past
Nursing’s image has been studied in past decades, but what’s rarely addressed is why on how nurses themselves reinforce traditional images of their work. Similarly, the historical origins of nurses, choices of verbal and visual images have been poorly explored. It’s crucial that, in a period of rampant cost cutting to health care services, nurses convey their central importance to hospital and health service managers, insures, policy makers, politicians, and new recruits to the profession. To do so, nurses must reexamine the history of their image as “virtuous workers” and understand the power that what we call the “virtue script” has over the nursing profession.
The virtue script dazes the presentation of nursing on characteristics such as kindness, caring, compassion, honesty, and trustworthiness, attributes associated with “good women”. This script sentimentalizes and trivializes the complex skills, including caring skills, nurses must acquire through education and experience- not simply individual inclination. Only when freed of the virtue script can nursing assert its identity as a knowledge-based profession that is critically important to patient’s care.
