Servants of the state: nurses caught between professional ethics and deathwork
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Nurses frequently top the polls as caring and trustworthy professionals. So consistently do nurses outperform other professions in these polls that nurses take for granted the public's esteem and affection. Indeed, so strong is the current of sentimentalism that surrounds nursing that whenever the media runs a story on nursing we are described in ‘angelic’ terms. While the profession basks in the public's trust, nursing's halo is brought into question by Holmes and Federman's invited commentary (this issue). One of the nursing profession's ‘dirty little secrets’ is exposed in this paper which brings to light nurses’ direct and indirect involvement in the execution of prisoners in the United States. Since 1977, death by lethal injection raises the possibility of some nurses being part of such American deathwork. They can be involved in assessing the prisoner's health, supervising or monitoring the procedure as well as procurement or preparation of the drugs or solution, insertion of intravenous equipment or injection of the solution (a nurse anaesthetist's or physician's role). There are two issues that we feel are important to emphasize here. The first is the zone of silence around these practices in the nursing literature. The second is the tragic irony of nursing, without any apparent sense of hypocrisy, continuing its caring discourse while transparently being engaged in sovereign practices (such as capital punishment) on behalf of the state. Are nurses aware that lethal injection or the procedures surrounding it are undertaken by physicians and nurses? What Holmes and Federman found is that this is a little known fact. Moreover, this is scarcely surprising as it is not possible to obtain any information about this area of practice. The states that use lethal injection have refused to release any information regarding the identity of nurses and physicians who participate in capital punishment. The number of registered nurses, advanced practice nurses and nurse anaesthetists who have participated in the execution of prisoners in the United States is unknown. Likewise information about the precise duties of nurses during the lethal injection process is suppressed. In addition, the nursing literature is so uncomfortable with any airing of this dirty linen that it was simply impossible for Holmes and Federman to be published in the North American nursing literature. To find their work you will need to look in the sociology and criminology literature (see their commentary for full references). Thus nurses searching on the usual databases and reading the current literature will find no reference to this troubling practice. The second issue to highlight is why is it so disturbing that nurses participate in capital punishment? It is our belief that the discomfort and the silence derive from the fact that nursing's humanist self-identity is seriously challenged by nursing work becoming merely the naked rule of the state. Is this caring, and if not, how can this be nursing? and if this is nursing, then the previously taken-for-granted reality of nursing as a humanist science must be questioned. This is evidently a re-evaluation that nursing is not ready to undertake and the actual (and easiest) solution is to keep these disturbing revelations confined to criminology, sociology and human rights organizations’ documentation. But this is an issue that will not go away. The criticisms of human rights groups of nursing's professional participation in lethal injection warrant frank and fearless discussion by ethicists, by specialist groups and by the profession more generally. If nurses are comfortable with lethal injection as an advanced practice role, let them defend this position. But first and foremost, let the veil of secrecy around these practices be challenged and allow nurses the long-overdue debate on the question.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,002 | 0,001 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,001 | 0,004 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,002 | 0,006 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; les deux têtes enseignantes s’accordent sur ce qui est montré ici.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».