Inter-relating nursing care and the social sciences: specialist disciplines in an applied course

Abstract

An integral part of any occupation’s struggle for autonomy and recognition as a profession is the development of long periods of training, leading to more exacting entry qualifications. This trend can be observed in many of the para-medical occupations, and not least in nursing, where degree courses have already been initiated at Newcastle, Leeds, and South Bank Polytechnics, and at Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Hull Universities. Other Universities and Polytechnics are planning to commence Nursing Degree courses in the near future. One important development in such higher level courses has been an acknowledgement of the role played in nursing care by social and psychological factors. Thus, for example, in the Council for National Academic Awards degree in Nursing which we teach on at Leeds Polytechnic, around 20% of the students’ total class contact time (not including clinical practice) is devoted to the study of the social sciences. The rationale for giving the social sciences such a sizable proportion of an already crowded curriculum seems to go along the following lines: in their work as qualified nurses, students will have to use their professional skills with people for whom being ill is usually an interlude. When people become ill they do so as members of a complex social and psychological setting. A stay in hospital may temporarily withdraw them from this setting, but if treatment is to be accounted successful, patients must still be able to operate competently in it on their discharge from hospital. Additionally, a significant proportion of the nursing profession’s work-community care and illness prevention-is carried out outside the hospital’s walls. If nurses are to make optimal use of their nursing skills, they need to understand the kinds of factors which make up this environment-factors such as social class, the family, race, education, personality, intelligence, roles, behaviour in small groups, patterns of human development. Such a rationale for the inclusion of social science content in nursing courses gives way almost imperceptibly to assumptions about the way this content should be presented. Initially it seemed only fitting that the structure of the social science contribution to the nursing degree at Leeds Polytechnic should tend to mimic that of combined degree courses in psychology and sociology. Our course had the traditional university