Book Review
Nursing Replay: researching nursing culture together
Annette Street
ISBN: 0 443 04761 8; 1995; 187 pages; Churchill Livingstone Melbourne;
Jennifer Greenwood
Professor of Nursing, Western Sydney Area Health Service, University of Western Sydney, Nepean NSW
This book is indispensable and compelling reading for anyone seriously interested in exploring nursing culture. Street sets out to replay some of her last four years' unpublished work on cultural explora tion through participatory clinical nursing research and to illuminate the achievements, constraints and dilemmas in establishing a nursing research culture in a large hospital.
Some indication of her target readership would, however, have been helpful; her 'Introduction' seems pitched for those with some understanding of contemporary theoretical debates whereas the bulk of the book seems pitched for a much broader readership. Street's theorising, she claims is in the margins, that is, somewhere between critical feminist positions and postmodernism; she partakes of differing perspectives as her theorising dictates while subscribing fully to none.
She deals briefly with this theoretical conundrum in her 'Introduction' but, I suspect, readers who are familiar with the critical-feminist-postmodern tensions to which she alludes would appreciate a more robust discussion of her position. The first chapters explore some of the mythologies which characterise nursing culture.
Street explores the myths of transcultural and heterosexual nursing and the pre-eminence of medical research. She also describes the mythological traditional and professional nurse but fails to address the authority accorded the non-nursing view over the nursing view, even on nursing issues, in her caricature of the traditional nurse.
This seems curious given her espoused marginal theoretical position. She has, however, some really interesting things to say about 'the tyranny of niceness' in some nursing subcultures, the causes and management of workload, the use of space in hospital, team-work ( or lack of it) and inconsistencies between policy and practice, at both macro and micro levels. For instance, she cites discrepancies between rhetoric and reality in relation to family-centred care and deinstitutionalised imperatives. She also indicts both nursing and general management for colluding to deskill professional nurses and failing to provide nursing research infrastructure.
Her latter chapters focus on participatory research; what she construes it to be, how to establish a research culture, and two excellent chapters on participatory research process and journalling. Street suggests that participatory research provides the means to 'replay' the dramas of nursing practice though reflection and deconstruction and then replay the action collaboratively through processes of reconstruction.
This is how nurses can demythologise their activities and remythologise them. Throughout this and the previous section she illustrates and brings her arguments to life by using verbatim reports and journal extracts, either those of her co-researchers or her own. I was disappointed, however, with her rather cursory treatment of the ethics of participatory research.
The author forewarns readers early in the book that some of the material she includes will make them feel uncomfortable. I agree that some of it will; some of it made me uncomfortable.
eContent Home
