Proefschriften Verpleegkunde

• Verpleegkundig beleid

Nurses and nursing practice are key in health policy and professional debate, and in healthcare organizations struggling with nurse shortages. In this context, the reorganization of nursing work is increasingly framed — politically and discursively — as an urgent global policy priority, sparking a wave of change initiatives in recent years.
Too often, however, the political nature of change is pushed aside by those working on and studying change in healthcare practice, policy, and research. Across fields, there is a strong tendency to treat change as technical and apolitical processes; detached from the organizational, institutional and political arenas in which envisioned changes are negotiated, contested and ultimately decided. This research challenges this deficit by zooming in on the politics of organizational change that inform and shape the reorganization of nursing work. In doing so, it seeks to offer a more comprehensive —and realist — account of how organizational change unfolds ‘on the ground’ in (Dutch) hospital practice and its multifaceted outcomes for the profession.
Drawing on extensive and engaged ethnographic research within ‘RN2Blend’ — a nationwide participatory research program tasked with studying and facilitating change in nursing — this research analyzes the politics of reorganizing nursing work ‘from within’. It shows how the reform of nursing work and the professionalization of nurses runs the risk of becoming stuck in politicized debates about identity, epistemic knowledge and organizational impact, arguing for the recognition of nurses’ practical and experimenting knowledge for organizational and policy change. The insights will be of interest to nurses, healthcare managers, professional nursing associations, policymakers, and anyone concerned practically or conceptually with power, politics, and organizational change — in nursing and beyond.

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