You learn from what’s wrong with the patient: defining nursing work

Abstract

In the ‘different world’ of the ward, students moved through 15 clinical placements according to the medical specialties that also defined the formal content of their training¹. At the City Hospital, as in most British teaching hospitals, the wards acquired their labels according to the specialty of the consultant physicians and surgeons who worked there, treating patients and teaching medical students. The wards were roughly divided between medicine and surgery, and then subdivided according to such specialties as oncology, neurology, gastroenterology, cardiology or orthopaedics. Specialties such as geriatrics, psychiatry, paediatrics, obstetrics and gynaecology were likely to be on separate wards and even in separate ‘sister’ hospitals. As the students progressed through their 15 placements, they not only changed wards but in some instances also hospitals, in order to fulfil their medically defined training requirements. The reason why they continued to see nursing as a branch of medicine thus became apparent.