Power, discourse, subjectivity: A foucauldian application to operating room nursing practice

The operating room, by the nature of the work carried out, is an area that requires a high level of technical skill necessary for the increasing use of complex technology. It is an area of short-term patient contact and long-term collegial relationships. The pedagogy of nursing places great emphasis on the notion of the nurse as "carer", as "nurturer", but does this create tensions for the expert practitioner in the operating room where the focus is and must be on the technical, and where for the majority of procedures the patient is unconscious. I suggest the most appropriate theoretical framework for this area of nursing practice with its inherent power relations is poststructuralism. Like most conceptual frameworks, "poststructuralism" can be understood in a variety of ways and depends on how the author understands the basic tenets of the "theory". Nevertheless, there are certain commonalities to all poststructural positions