Original scientific paper
Depersonalization of Nurses in Conditions of a Bio-technologically Based Medicine
Stipe Orešković
; Faculty of Medicine, Zagreb
Abstract
Medical sociology, as a special branch of sociology, has gained most of its public and academic acknowledgements, financial and organizational support, trough studies on social and professional relationships between physicians and their patients. In the middle of this century this relationship was interpreted as a pure interpersonal relationship. With the development of basic natural sciences, physics, biology and chemistry, as well as the technological application, of this notios the relationship physician-patient has become manifoldly interceded. The professional role of the nurse is changing in accordance with these tendencies and is characterized by growing processes of alienation and depersonalization.
The article analyzes the following:
1. Processes of alienation and nurses and depersonalization of patients in hospitals which are still not characterized by a high degree of bio-technologically based process of treatment;
2. Changes that occur in the organization of health practice and in the character of medical knowledge by acquiring new knowledge and technologies;
3. needs for new approaches to studies on the relationship nurse-patient, physician-patient and nurse-physician and in the context of subjectivizing technology and objectivizing health personnel.
Using Seeman’s classification of different degrees of alienation of nurses, the study has shown that already in the 70's nurses experience in the process of work the following:
1. Everyday tasks become a routine
2. Formalized everyday work become a ritual
3. Isolation in relation to the group who they are working with.
The result of these processes is the loss of social identity and professional responsibility. All these experiences are characteristic for the initial phase of introducing sophisticated technology into work which is performed with people. That is why it can be concluded that the present position of physicians in the bio-technologically based health care is anticipated by the position of nurses. Both professional groups experience changes of their social position from the status of the subject of medical practice to the status of depersonalized means of computer or cybernetic processing of patients. These processes require from medical sociology to change the paradigm on the basis of which it has analyzed the relationship physician-patient as well as the epistema on the basis of which it has accepted the bio-medical model of medicine.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
155328
URI
Publication date:
30.6.1990.
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