With and for the Patient: The Knowledges Embodied in Nurses' Practices-of-Work in Acute Care.

Area of Science:

• Nursing
• Sociology of Health
• Qualitative Research

Background:

• Current understanding of nursing often focuses on clinical decision-making for patient tasks.
• Alternative views highlight nurses' experiential knowledge and professional expertise.
• There's a need to explore how nurses enact their practice in real-time settings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To extend the understanding of how nurses in acute care accomplish nursing practice.
• To analyze nursing practice through the lens of 'reconnaissance' as a conceptualization of nursing knowledge.
• To reframe nursing practice as context-specific knowledge activation rather than solely decision-making.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from an ethnographic study.
• Framed the study within Bourdieu's theory of practice.
• Employed 'reconnaissance' as a conceptual vocabulary to analyze nursing practice data.

Main Results:

• Nursing practice is characterized by the activation of contextualized knowledge to address patient care needs.
• Nurse agency is demonstrated through working with and for patients.
• Nurses dynamically adjust practices to unfolding situations when managing multiple patients.

Conclusions:

• Nursing-in-practice is about using situated knowledge to respond to patient care requirements.
• Nurse agency involves adapting practices to meet the unique needs of each patient.
• Focusing on daily work reveals how nurses prioritize patients as individuals within complex care environments.