Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines: Professional Intimacy in Hospital Nursing

Conclusion: A Call for Collective Nursing Practices and Continued Research

Consider the following scenarios. • You are a patient who has been educated on the relationship between intimacy and quality health care. You know that how you recover depends in part on how your nurse negotiates intimacy and professionalism. When you enter a hospital that has a reputation for caring nurses, you know that reputation exists because nurses are taught to care well and are not simply caring because they think it comes naturally to them. You understand that your nurse will be a good nurse because his or her care work will be supported by the hospital as labor and not just as an institutional value. You know that care is not just an idea but also an interaction that nurses will negotiate with you. You understand that your nurse was not born to care but was trained how to care for you and that this labor might not always be pleasant for your nurse. You understand that you might feel pain and mistrust but that your nurse will help you work through these feelings so you can get well. In addition to receiving patient rights literature, you also find literature in your hospital room on how to treat your nurse. You read about behaviors that are acceptable and behaviors that disrupt the care process. You know that you will trust your nurse but that trust will come only with effort from both of you. You know you will pay for your hospital visit and that your nurse will receive compensation for his Conclusion A Call for Collective Nursing Practices and Continued Research 160 ConClusion or her labor, but this relationship between money and care does not tarnish the quality health care you will receive. • As a new nurse, you have studied the relationship between intimacy and professionalism in your job. Ideally, you were recruited to nursing not by signs that said “born to be a nurse” but by signs that emphasized care training and expertise. You look forward to caring for others, and you know that your education will prepare you to handle intimacy in the workplace. You are proud that you feel like a caring person and that you have caring expertise. You learned in school that there is not one way to provide care; instead, quality health care shifts according to social constructions of identities such as gender, race, nationality, and sexuality. You know that you will professionally care for your patients, and you feel assured that this work will be supported by a team. You are prepared to handle typical abuses that come from intimate labor and patient familiarity with nurses: sexual harassment, entitlement, and anger. If you cannot handle a situation alone, you feel assured that the next right move is to get help from a colleague. Your administrators and directors understand that providing quality care is collective work and you will be rewarded for asking questions and working as a team player. • As an experienced nurse, you now realize that you are not alone in how you have honed your caregiving skills over the years. You understand that what may have felt like intuition is actually a complex set of specialized skills. You now recognize what you may have thought of as your own, isolated practice of care as patterns of professional labor shared by your colleagues. You understand the relationship between individual and collective practice and can see how giving care is a social as well as an individual practice. You now have additional language to articulate your caregiving efforts so that these efforts, and the efforts of others, are recognized as professional work. You probably already mentor new nurses informally, but now you might begin to strategize how to connect these efforts to your administration’s goals of ensuring quality health care. More likely than not, you believe that care can be taught and institutionally reinforced. • As a nurse director, you are now empowered to continue to support your nurses in their care work. You know that nurses negotiate intimacy professionally and that race, gender, nationality, and other social constructs influence these negotiations. Although patients do ConClusion 161 not and should not always be expected to notice nurses’ labor, you understand the work it takes for nurses to negotiate trust, mistrust, and conflict with patients. Ideally, you work in a hospital that understands care as both a value and labor. You understand that it is an unfair and unrealistic goal...