Rural Nurse Specialists: Clinical Practice and the Politics of Care

Abstract

Doctor flight from rural areas is an international phenomenon that places great pressure on primary health care delivery. In New Zealand, the response to these empty doctors' surgeries has been the introduction of nurse-led rural health clinics that have attracted controversy both in the media and from urban-based doctors over whether such nurse-led care is a direct substitution of medical care. This article analyzes the reflections of nurses working in some of these clinics who suggest that their situation is more complex than a direct substitution of labor. Although the nurses indicate some significant pressures moving them closer to the work of doctoring, they actively police this cross-boundary work and labor simultaneously to shore up their nursing identities. My own conclusions support their assertions. I argue that it is the maintenance of a holistic professional habitus that best secures their professional identity as nurses while they undertake the cross-boundary tasks of primary rural health care. There are clear professional benefits and disadvantages for the nurses in these situations, which make the positions highly politicized. These recurring divisions of labor within medical care giving and the elaboration of new types of care worker form an appropriate although neglected topic of study for anthropologists. The study of the social organization of clinical medicine is much enriched by paying closer attention to its interaction with allied health professions and their associated understandings of “good” care.