IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/120430.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Nurses are seen as general cargo, not the smart TVs you ship carefully': the politics of nurse staffing in England, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands

Author

Listed:
  • Wallenburg, Iris
  • Friebel, Rocco
  • Winblad, Ulrika
  • Maynou Pujolras, Laia
  • Bal, Roland

Abstract

Nurse workforce shortages put healthcare systems under pressure, moving the nursing profession into the core of healthcare policymaking. In this paper, we shift the focus from workforce policy to workforce politics and highlight the political role of nurses in healthcare systems in England, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Using a comparative discursive institutionalist approach, we study how nurses are organised and represented in these four countries. We show how nurse politics plays out at the levels of representation, working conditions, career building, and by breaking with the public healthcare system. Although there are differences between the countries - with nurses in England and Spain under more pressure than in the Netherlands and Sweden - nurses are often not represented in policy discourses; not just because of institutional ignorance but also because of fragmentation of the profession itself. This institutional ignorance and lack of collective representation, we argue, requires attention to foster the role and position of nurses in contemporary healthcare systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Wallenburg, Iris & Friebel, Rocco & Winblad, Ulrika & Maynou Pujolras, Laia & Bal, Roland, 2023. "Nurses are seen as general cargo, not the smart TVs you ship carefully': the politics of nurse staffing in England, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120430, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120430
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120430/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Owens, Kellie, 2022. "The passivists: Managing risk through institutionalized ignorance in genomic medicine," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 294(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      More about this item

      Keywords

      discursive institutionalism; institutional ignorance; nurse politics; workforce shortage;
      All these keywords.

      JEL classification:

      • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
      • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General

      NEP fields

      This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

      Statistics

      Access and download statistics

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120430. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.