In this study, I focus specifically on nurses’ actions related to pain. I establish how a different way of theorising ‘pain’ can assist in exploring how nurses’ subjectivity is constituted. I seek to open up possibilities for challenge and resistance by nurses to the dominant practices that influence how actions of nurses in relation to pain, come to exist. In challenging taken-for-granted representations of how pain is understood, I do not discount representations reported in literature, or as stated by people considered, for example, pain ‘experts’. Rather, I challenge how, these representations of pain and pain expertise, have come to exist as self-present truth, and seek to explore what other representations are marginalised as a consequence. I am aware that the interpretations of representations that I forward are open to this same critique. For my exploration of nurses’ actions related to pain for people having elective surgery, I undertook a poststructural analysis, informed by the works of Derrida, and Foucault. In particular, I constituted my thesis, in Derrida’s dictum ‘we are written as we write’, and Foucault’s analysis of three intersected topics: power, truth and the formation of selves. I analysed literature related to pain and management of that pain as text, and employed ethnographic techniques of observation, interviews and collection of documentary materials, to analyse nurses’ actions as text. I attempt to present a new text of nurses’ actions related to pain. I challenge the view that there is an essential true meaning that resides in pain, literature related to pain, or nurses’ actions aligned to that pain. Analysing how nurses’ subjectivity is written, in relation to pain, provides to nurses a means to read and write nurses’ actions in different ways. I reveal how a specific way of writing nurses’ actions, articulates a particular version of truth about pain, and how nurses are then positioned within this version of truth, and in turn, how nurses position people constituted as patients. I explore how, organisation as structure, is a way of thinking that continues to make invisible the power and politics dynamic in nurses’ actions related to pain. If the word ‘pain’ is taken as understood by nurses, that is, it is known what ‘pain’ means, this way of thinking will continue to privilege one meaning of pain in the hospital, and, maintain a traditional perspective of ‘organisation as structure’. In opening out alternate understandings of pain, and readings of nurses’ actions, the study allows for the possibility that pain, and the way that nurses act in relation to that pain, may indeed mean different things to different people. / thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2000
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/173370 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Price, Kay |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | © 2000 Kay Price |
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