Paradoxical pursuits in child health nursing practice: discourses of scientific mothercraft

Abstract

In New Zealand child health nurses are employed by a voluntary organization called the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society (RNZPS) and are called Plunket nurses. These nurses primarily work in the community with the parents of new babies and preschool children. Their work is called child health surveillance and this is considered to involve routine and unproblematic practices generally carried out in the context of a relationship between the nurse and the mother. However, there are suggestions in the literature that historically the nurse's surveillance role has conflicting objectives, as she is at the same time an inspector and family friend. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses of scientific mothercraft and their implications for the nurse-mother relationship, drawing on the author's recent research into surveillance and the exercise of power in the child health nursing context. The application of Foucauldian discourse analysis to the texts generated by interviews with five New Zealand child health nurses confirms that this paradoxical role has never been fully resolved.