Our dreams

Abstract

There has been a multitude of literature about the nursing profession's goals to gain full professional status but a paucity of literature on individual nurse's aspirations for the nursing profession. A group of six co-researchers, myself included, looked at this perceived gap of nurses' dreams for the profession. The philosophical underpinnings of the research were feminist, and reflected postmodern feminist and some radical feminist concepts. The knowledge we researched was how we actively construct ourselves into dominant social values. This means, we were searching for how our dreams were constructed and how we reflected the values of society in the way we produced our dreams. Peace and Power (Chinn & Wheeler, 1989) was used to guide the group interaction and Memory-Work (Haug, 1987) for data collection and analysis. The co-researchers wrote individual stories about their dreams for the nursing profession. Collective analysis of the stories occurred in order to uncover the way in which the dreams were constructed. From this collective analysis the individual co-researchers then redrafted their stories. This redraft contained new insights, motives and actions of ourselves and others, forgotten experiences and inconsistencies, as a way to identify and question dominant ideologies. The aim to move towards empowerment through making the unconscious conscious. Four common dreams emerged from analysis of the stories. The first was that individual nurses want full professional status and autonomy; the second dream asked for nurses to care and support each other; a high standard of patient and nursing focused care was the third dream and the fourth dream was for continuing education and for knowledge to be shared between nurses. Although the dreams were common across the group it was found that the dreams varied in their construction. The dreams for each group member reflected multiple realities that emerged from different contexts, influenced by historical and social dominant cultural values. Through studying and theorising our dreams for the nursing profession, we increased our understanding of how they were shaped so that we were able to initiate change and make our dreams become a reality. This has implications for the nursing profession. We live our lives collectively, as nurses and women, as others influence our being and reality. Although others influence us, it is each individual nurse who contributes to actively construct themselves into the dominant cultural values held by society and therefore, up to each individual to initiate change. If nurses are able to make their dreams a reality then positive changes will occur within the profession; i.e. decreased staff turnover, increased morale and increased quality patient care.