The interaction between doctors and nurses in the context of a hospital ward

This article addresses a fundamental, albeit scarcely discussed, issue in health studies: the relationship between doctors and nurses. We rely on a ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews undertaken in a female ward of a public hospital in order to analyze certain aspects of these relationships, based on hermeneutics and science studies. The empiric observation showed that Doctors organized their practice and clinical decisions on certain abstractions and dialogued in a structured, highly specialized and restricted language. Nurses materialized medical decisions, guided by the prescriptions. They had no room to interfere in clinical decisions, being very busy with their tasks and not dominating the clinical discourse, which is crucial for discussing the decisions. In the context of this study, physicians and nurses maintained a distance established by the theory, technique and values shared by each professional group. Thus, we suggest that knowledge, practices and medical values and nurses were incommensurate with each other, and that this directly affected the health care actions performed in that setting.