Perspectives in development: the problem of nurses and nursing in Zambia

The training of indigenous women in hospital nursing is directly modelled on western services. Hence training does not address social problems attendant on implicit cultural conflict between indigenous and western healing systems and conceptualisations of illness. Because these problems are not faced in the curriculum, nurses are imperfectly socialised into the modern health care setting. They, and the public, continue to accept the efficacy of both health care systems, assuming complementarity when in fact in many respects they conflict. The involvement of young women in healing, a radical innovation, became institutionalized. Because of the high visibility of the nurse and a radical change in the role of young women as healers, and because of the vulnerability of the patients, conflict in treatment systems focused on nurses who became scapegoats in hospitals, which came to be called 'houses of death'.