[Outsiders in their own home: patients in a nursing home unit]

During a term of probation for the doctoral course in sociology at the university of Nijmegen a research was made for the relatinship between patients and staff on the ward of a nursing home. This relation was investigated with the use of Elias and Scotson's model of an established and outsiders figuration. In this figuaration are several sources of power, as fysical capacities, knowledge, key-positions and cohesion, important. These are considered more thoroughly. Some of the central problems of a nursing home are becoming more clear in the elaboratin of processes as exclusion and stigmatization. The questions efficiency or humanity and the normality or abnormality of the behaviour of the patients are considered against the background of the contrast between living environment for the patients and work environment for the staff. One of the conclusions is that because of the central place of medical and nursing-technical thinking there isn't much room left for the living of the patients, in spite of the fact this being an explicit care of the investigated home.