Nurses are oppressed?! Do we oppress others?

Valerie Salva, BSN, RN · Feb 7, 2009

I don't think nurses do oppress other professions.

As far as the profession heirarchy, we are at the bottom of the food chain.

I am talking true professions- i.e. medicine, teaching, law, engineering, scientists.

SharonH, RN · Feb 8, 2009

I don't think of myself as oppressed, neither personally nor professionally. I know that doesn't answer your question but I had to get that out.....

I'm curious, how could we oppress other professions? You may want to think of another slant for your paper.

OldButCuteBSNStudent · Feb 8, 2009

I think, as a profession, we oppress each other terribly, I personally have experienced and witnessed a heirarchy (nurses eat their young) as I traversed through nursing school and on my first job. It became increasingly worse showing up as lateral violence in the workplace primarily because of blurry boundaries relating to mentorship/preceptorship and ill prepared nursing education departments.

Perhaps we would not be on the bottom rung of true "professions" if we stopped oppressing each other by participating in lateral violence in the workplace and open the profession up for kind, compassionate, result-oriented mentorship of each other. I am certainly not saying that it happens everywhere, all-the-time and may certainly not be the norm; however it remains, I believe, the dark, not-often-discussed reality of our profession. Practicing what we preach about flexibly, positively educating and caring for our patients and transferring that example by extending it to each other in the mentorship/preceptor role would provide a shorter educational curve for our "younger" less experienced nurses and not wear out our more experienced, valuable nurses.

Just MHO :redbeathe

Whispera, MSN, RN · Feb 8, 2009

I can't think of how we oppress those in other professions, but do truly believe we oppress each other. I read an article one time about the "Queen Bee Theory." Maybe if you do a search on that it might help you.

HappyBunnyNurse · Feb 8, 2009

You might could discuss oppression of one type of nurse group by another. Ex: LPN/RN or RN/MSN. I'm not saying this is true; I just thought it might have been researched.

feralnostalgia · Feb 8, 2009

the strongest case I can think of is if you talked about how importing lots and lots of nurses from places like the philipines to alleviate shortages in the US is making shortages worse in less developed countries. that incorporates a marxist perspective into the feminist commentary - the labor market depriving already exploited places of their best talent, thus lowering the quality of healthcare for poorer countries. how many american doctors do you know who go work in India? I really doubt the proportions are remotely comparable to the inverse situation.

do nurses, by following jobs in "better" places, perpetuate the oppression of the poor by not contributing to equal healthcare access? how many nurses who grew up inner-city go back to those neighborhoods vs taking a cushier suburban job? I bet there are way way more nurses per person in western countries than in south asia or africa, even though their public health situations are often way worse than ours. nurses have the choice to have better jobs and more comfortable lives or to go back to places like that and help out. I'm not sure I can blame an individual for not wanting to go work with the red cross in a warzone or do AIDS work in mozambique or haiti or wherever, but it's definitely a form of systematic oppression and structural injustice that medical professionals will flock towards money and power when its the poor who need us most. infant mortality rates in inner cities are also comparable to third world countries...seriously, if memory and wikipedia serve, welfare hospitals in washington DC and NYC have higher death rates than papua new guinea does. how many nurses are working for plastic surgeons giving people boob jobs while the urban poor are dying not half an hour's car ride away? all of us contribute to oppression somehow.

you could also talk about racism and homophobia among nurses, though that's not really specific to the profession. questions about the medical care of transexual patients might also be fruitful.

there's certainly also a case to be made that a for-profit medical system is oppressive in and of itself.

(forgive my ranting, I switched to nursing from a marxist-feminist sociology department because ******** about oppression and throwing statistics at people won't go nearly as far in making the world a better place as actual medical training...somehow I'd imagine the average nurse has done a great deal more good for other people than some of the best academics...)

if your school library has access to proquest, (it probably does on its website under the "research databases" section), run a search on the terms "nursing" and "oppression" or some of the other terms for your paper subject, and click the little boxes underneath to indicate peer-reviewed articles only and full text only. it should definitely bring up a lot of academic stuff that you won't find on google. if you can find a sociology-specific research datable that would work wonderfully too.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Feb 8, 2009

Good luck with your paper. In some respects we are oppressed. In some respects we're empowered. We are expected to be worker bees without complaint, etc. etc. etc.

In many ways we are like employees everywhere being told what to do, having little voice in the overall scheme of things.

Good luck with that.

RN1982 · Feb 8, 2009

Sometimes I think we do. I worked in a very toxic environment where a new nurse was openly picked on. The senior staff nurses would look through her charting and point out what they thought was wrong with it even though it was accurate and charted per policy/procedure and they did this when she was off orientation. The new nurse had been a nurse for about 15 years. Sadly, the senior staff nurses didn't give her a chance to win them over. The new nurse was killed by her husband about six months after she started working with us.

oramar · Feb 8, 2009

The tendency for powerless people to indulge in lateral violence is well documented.

llg, PhD, RN · Feb 8, 2009

Great topic! Welcome to allnurses.

I did a presentation on critical theory during my doctoral program and made a case that we are both oppressed and oppressors. Some people accepted my argument and others could only think of nurses as victims and not as active participants in a social system that supports everyone in their feelings of oppression.

Physicians feel oppressed because they feel constrained by hospital policies and by the need to tailor their practice to the needs and desires of the other people on the staff. They also feel oppressed by government regulations, insurance companies, etc.

Administrators feel oppressed because everyone hates them -- and they feel "held hostage" by government, accreditor, and financial constraints. They also feel constrained by the need to satisfy the nursing staff so that they stay -- while spending the least amount of money possible (to please the Board of Directors and keep their jobs.) In other words, administrators feel oppressed because they are caught in the middle of it all.

Nursing assistants feel oppressed by the RN's. LPN's feel oppressed by the RN's. For evidence of that, just read a lot of the threads by those groups on allnurses.

Respirator Therapists, Occupational Therapists, etc. can feel oppressed by having to meet the needs of the nursing staff -- while the nursing staff may get bonuses etc. that they don't get (and more pay) due to "nursing shortage" strategies.

The list goes on and on -- but you can get my point.

Our current culture -- developed through the widespread use of critical social theory throughout the 20th century -- relies a lot on the concept of "victimization." We all see ourselves as victims of something and therefore we are not fully responsible for our actions and attitudes. We blame the oppressors for everything rather than take responsibility for ourselves.

In class, I made the case that I did not want to go to work each day in an environment in which everyone thought of themselves as being victimized by everyone else. I concluded that we need to "back off" the reliance on the concept of victimization and do a better job of encouraging the concept of self reliance and personal accountability.

That was back in 1993. Not much has changed since then.

The literature emphasizes nurses as victims. Nurses don't want to face the fact that we can be equally as guilty of oppressing others. I'd recommend searching this board and getting a sense of how some of the CNA's and LPN's feel. You also might want to check out bulletin boards of other groups we work with (RT, Lab, etc.)

Good luck!

alex_hamilton18 · Feb 8, 2009

Thank you for the replies... some very interesting points raised here... which i plan to explore more thoroughly in the literature! :)

feralnostalgia: very interesting point(s).. I think I may bring this one up in class for a good ol' fashion discussion/debate

TraumaNurse07: that story is brutal...

Thanks everyone!

Alex.