Search PubMed⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

T Rudge

Publications and source records attributed to T Rudge.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Did anything change? Caregivers and schizophrenia after medication changes.

This paper reports on a qualitative, critical study into the lives of relatives and partners of people living with enduring effects of schizophrenia. A review of the literature showed that caregivers and relatives of sufferers were seldom asked about their experiences, instead they were subject to blame or criticism regarding their parental or caregiving practices. Caregivers of people with schizophrenia were interviewed in order to reveal their experience of caring for their kin after a medication change to atypical neuroleptics. The interview analysis was compared with mental health professional literature, using a Foucauldian approach to reveal the operation of language and power in the positioning of caregivers. This analysis was then compared to the talk of the caregivers. Similarities and differences in their ways of talking about caring were identified. Caregivers spoke of protracted periods of time before the establishment of a definite diagnosis, ambivalence about medication and 'never giving up'. The paper concludes that life for caregivers is constituted as doubly problematic, experiencing stigma personally and vicariously through their kin.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2001

Re-awakenings? A discourse analysis of the recovery from schizophrenia after medication change.

This paper explores the construction of recovery from schizophrenia after medication change through the analysis of people living with schizophrenia. The study is framed by a discourse analysis which assumes that the language used to discuss schizophrenia and its treatment by medication is imbued with the power relations of mental health. The analysis uses research literature, pharmaceutical literature and previous studies of schizophrenia as the discursive background that frames how recovery can be talked about. The discussion highlights how the discourses of medical science construct recovery as a linear event that silences the embodiment of schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia refuse this construction, through finding a 'niche' for themselves. In conclusion, the paper suggests how such analysis opens up for exploration of the silencing of 'insanity', and establishes a beginning dialogue with people who live with the continuing presence of schizophrenia.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2001

Procedure manuals and textually mediated death.

The procedure manual as a document represents the practice of nursing care. Analysis of such manuals allows us to explore discourses of nursing and the ways in which they frame nursing practice. A critical analysis of a hospital procedure manual using discourse analysis was undertaken. A specific excerpt concerning 'Last offices' is used as an example of the institutionalisation of organisational values and beliefs as these influence nursing care. 'Last offices' directs nursing practices related to the death of a patient, and the laying out as preparation for the funeral director or coroner. The analysis shows that procedure manuals reproduce hegemonic ideologies of nursing. The analysis also shows how nursing practices are constituted by intersecting forces of differing locations such as the hospital as an organisation, the healthcare system and the wider society within which these function.

Attitude to Death↗
PubMed1999

Situating wound management: technoscience, dressings and 'other' skins.

This paper addresses the notion of wound care as a technology of skin and other skins imbued with the combined power of technology and science. It presents the discourses of wound care evident in the accounts of patients and nurses concerning this care, and discussions about wounds in wound care interest groups, journals, and advertising material about wound care products. The discussion focuses on wounds and wound dressings as effects immanent in the power relations of discourses of wound care. These effects colour and influence nurses' responses to wounds and wound care products. Moreover, the discourses that portray these practices are evidence of the complex articulation between technoscience and gender. Nurses and patients are fascinated by wound technoscience and lured towards it by its potential for mastery and control over wounds. Such seductions are evident in the texts of nurses, patients, and pharmaceutical advertisements for wound care products. Finally, the ways that these representations are used to talk about and market wound care products are shown as exemplifying the finer points of wound management as a nursing technoscience.

Advertising↗
PubMed1998

Skin as cover: the discursive effects of 'covering' metaphors on wound care practices.

This paper outlines a Foucauldian analysis of interactions between nurses and patients during wound care procedures in a burns unit. It explores the use of Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of abjection and the abject body to illuminate the emotional affects of wounds on nurse and patient. In this process, I identify how cultural metaphoric understandings about skin influence and organise the care of burns patients. Such analysis suggests the import of the complete skin, the medical scientific control over the definition of this work, and the emotional forces that resist such control.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1996

(Re) writing ethnography: the unsettling questions for nursing research raised by post-structural approaches to 'the field'.

Positivist ethnographic research situates the participant observer in an objectivist position towards the field. Using post-structural perspectives to analyse the field challenges and unsettles objectivist assumptions underpinning ethnography. Neither is merging of the two approaches completely unproblematic. A crucial element in a coherent amalgam centres around resolution of potential contradictions emanating from the place of field notes in ethnographic research, and the position of the researcher (author) vis-a-vis such notes. Contemporary approaches to field notes maintain that such notes are not an objective description of the field, unaffected by the voice of the researcher. Rather, observational records are to be regarded as text, with characteristics in common with all texts. The ethnographic record is constituted as much by the positionality of the researcher as by the research participants. The nurse researcher can be viewed as participant in the constitution of the field. In unsettling and challenging taken-for-granted understandings about nursing practice, I am affirming the centrality of the position of the nurse in nursing research.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1995

Validation of cues for competencies of beginning level mental health nurses: an exploratory study in South Australian mental health agencies.

This paper outlines competency statements and their validation in mental health nursing. It describes: the background to the study, developments in perspectives on professional competency, the research process, the results, and issues that arose out of the research. The authors suggest that such research allows for the exploration of both nursing practice and the context in which psychiatric/mental health nursing is practised. This research has highlighted the complexity of mental health nursing practice in Australia, and an area of research that needs further development.

Clinical Competence↗
PubMed1994

The panopticon re-visited?: an exploration of the social and political dimensions of contemporary health care and nursing practice.

Insights from critical and postmodern perspectives are used to explore some of the aspects of contemporary nursing practice and health care which are taken for granted. Such an exploration begins to deconstruct the power relations implicit within the socio-political context of the health care arena in which nursing operates. In particular, the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault is used to explore the discourses of the various health care "experts". Aspects of women's health and nursing practice are used as exemplars of the limiting effects of such discourses.

Delivery of Health Care↗
PubMed1994

Nursing as textually mediated reality.

Nursing and nursing practice both construct and are in turn constructed by the context in which they operate. Texts plays a central part in that construction. As such, nursing and nursing practice can be considered to represent a reality that is textually mediated. This paper explores the notion of nursing as a textually mediated reality and offers the reader the possibility of engaging in reflection on what implications this has for nursing and their own nursing practice. The analyses provided draw on aspects of the work of both Foucault and Derrida. Foucault's notion of discourse provides a vehicle for the exploration of nursing as textually mediated, as does Derrida's concept of binary oppositions. The paper thus illustrates some of the possibilities afforded nursing by poststructural analyses. In particular it does this by exploring one of the central textual constructions, impacting on the way that nursing and nursing practice are conceptualized, the mind/body binary opposition.

Communication↗
PubMed1994

Been there, done that? Consciousness raising, critical theory and nurses.

The concept of consciousness raising has become somewhat tired and jaded in nursing literature. Indeed the notion of consciousness raising and its associated catchcry of 'making the personal political', is almost so hackneyed as to be somewhat unfashionable and clichéd in the 1990s. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that consciousness raising emanated from the women's movement of the 1960s and was originally directed at linking the personal and the political, but in nursing emphasis has often been given to the personal with little recourse to the political. It is thus timely and important to draw on insights afforded by critical perspectives and synthesize them anew with the tenets of consciousness raising in order to make explicit the power relations and structural oppression implicit in the nursing context. If consciousness raising, and the making of the personal political, are combined with the theoretical insights provided by critical theorists such as Faoucault (1977, 1980), it is possible to re-orient and re-energise the somewhat trite and worn catchcry of the personal as political.

Awareness↗
PubMed1993

A multi-generational staff development model for registered nurses.

The paper focuses on a significant nursing initiative for staff development undertaken in South Australia. The initiative arose out of Health Commission funded consultancy which sought to develop a staff development model for registered nurses. The outcome of this consultancy was the development of a multi-generational staff development model, known as the DPS Staff Development Model. This model provides a framework through which staff development activities can be analysed, consolidated and extended. The paper outlines the DPS Staff Development Model, the context in which it was developed and its implications for nursing staff development programmes. The development of the model was premised on a number of assumptions. These included the need to ensure flexibility, longevity, offer a perspective of staff development that is realistic and practical, and facilitate in registered nurses a sense of ownership and personal responsibility with respect to their development. The model comprises six broad areas of focus: the Career Development Model for registered nurses in South Australia, the structure of the model, locations in which staff development occurs, elements which assist in maintaining skills and knowledge, elements which enhance growth and development and the processes and relationships necessary for the successful implementation of staff development programmes.

Career Mobility↗
PubMed1992

Reflections on Benner: a critical perspective.

This paper examines the theoretical perspective of Patricia Benner (1984; 1989) as outlined in two of her recent works. The evaluative criteria used are the critical perspective developed by Carr and Kemmis (1986). The interpretive strengths of her work are identified and extended by comparison with the work of Lawler (1991). Problems in Benner's analyses are found to centre around the weaknesses of the interpretive perspective. An analysis of the structural constraints that act to distort the interpretation of nurses' work is offered as an alternative. An evaluation is given of the relevance to practice of Benner's work.

Humans↗