[Conceptual models; a power strategy with professional implications]

Conceptual models and nursing theories are considered by some authors as standards that guide the thinking on how to be a nurse and practice nursing. Some authors defend that without the use of nursing models it could be difficult to improve the discipline and nursing practice, and even to transform a professional identity linked to submission, obedience and humility. The purpose of this article is not to argue about the truth or falseness, the usefulness, or not, of conceptual nursing models, but to analyse, from a post-structuralist perspective, their use as a power strategy exercised mainly by nurses since the 1970's in Spain and the unintentional professional implications of their adoption by the nursing profession. The basis of this analysis is from the results obtained in the PhD thesis of the author, in which it analysed the processes of continuity and transformation which constituted the professional identity of nurses in Spain between 1956 and 1976. Some political and social consequences are highlighted on nursing practices, on the holistic, humanist and moralist discourses transmitted by nursing models, on occasions compared with bio-pathological, technical and clinical discourses.