Condition Knowing: A Nursing Approach to Addressing Health Injustice

To explore how registered nurses understand, use, and communicate their knowing of contemporary societal and political issues that impact the health and wellbeing of those they care for in practice.

The research employed a critical constructivist methodology, which presupposes that the relationship between the knower and what is to be known is a process developed through experience and shaped by interactions with societal structures.

Twenty-six registered nurses from various clinical and educational settings in Aotearoa New Zealand participated in interviews, focus groups and key informant interviews. Data were analysed through the lenses of communicative action, epistemic injustice and critical constructivism.

The findings suggest that registered nurses' relationship with socio-political knowing can unintentionally support existing systems and practices. This happens when socio-political understanding is shaped by limited resources, institutional racism, emotional distress, epistemic injustices, and a sense of disconnection from the wider nursing profession. Building on the interpretation of the findings, we propose Condition Knowing as an essential epistemological approach to addressing health injustice.

Nurses can rebuild the disjuncture between social and political knowing by identifying how and where nursing knowledge interests are subsumed and critiquing the influence of systematic and administrative mechanisms that disrupt meaningful practice for social justice. Communicating meaningfully involves recognising and talking openly about the forces that shape this knowing. This means going beyond what we know we value, who we know we are, and how we know. It means acting as a professional group to claim agency over our socio-political ways of knowing.

Condition Knowing involves recognising the conditions that tie, obscure and fragment nursing knowledge interests in health care systems and disrupt meaningful action for change.

This research examined registered nurses' understanding of socio-political knowledge. Participants provided feedback on the transcripts and analyses throughout various stages of the research process, as outlined in the manuscript. This approach was consistent with the study's objectives, methodology and ethical approvals. There was no further involvement from patients, caregivers, or members of the public in the research processes.