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Biomedical subjects

Dave Holmes

Publications and source records attributed to Dave Holmes.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing.

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive 'caring' nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals' skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states' death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states' penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.

Capital Punishment↗
PubMed2003

Constructing monsters: correctional discourse and nursing practice.

This article presents the results of a nursing research that aimed at describing the practice of nursing in an extreme environment where social control and psychiatric nursing care are inextricably enmeshed with one another. The study results indicate that the Correctional Psychiatric Centre (CPC) is a site where two antagonistic discourses (that of the hospital and that of the prison) are contending for the human resources in place. Given that the asylum and the prison are as such two distinct institutions, the correctional psychiatric centre constitutes an ideological space that results from the fusion of both the psychiatric and penal apparatuses. However, characteristics commonly attributed to prisoners, such as 'lying', 'dangerous', 'monstrous' and 'manipulative' are superimposed on the nurses' common theoretical representation that a patient is a person to whom care is provided. Monstrosity was a term regularly employed to describe particular types of inmates. The literature on monsters in quite informative in order to understand the impact of such a representation of forensic psychiatric nursing practice.

Commitment of Persons with Psychiatric Disorders↗
PubMed2002

Nursing as means of governmentality.

BACKGROUND: This paper conceptualizes nursing as a health profession in transformation at the beginning of the 21st century. We frame our analysis using Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. While extensively quoted and used in other disciplines, the work of the late French philosopher has been cited infrequently in the nursing literature. Yet a closer look at his work reveals how Foucault offers a relevant entry point for revisiting nursing theory and nursing practice. AIM OF THE PAPER: aim of this paper is to reflect on nursing practice as it is inscribed within the state's modus operandi. We discuss the prevalent notion that nurses are powerless and suggest they do exercise power in many ways and that they are a powerful group. RESULTS: In this paper we show how nursing is a means of governmentality of individuals and of the population because its practices contribute to the management of society through a vast range of power techniques. These techniques range from disciplining individuals to promoting discourses that construct desirable subjectivities. Within this perspective, the emergence of political aspects of nursing theory and nursing practice are made explicit. CONCLUSION: We explore the limits and potentials of the concept of governmentality to the understanding of nursing as a health profession. This concept can generate a form of critical immobilism, but also promotes a more politically complex understanding of nursing practice.

Health Promotion↗
PubMed2002

Police and pastoral power: governmentality and correctional forensic psychiatric nursing.

Police and pastoral power: governmentality and correctional forensic psychiatric nursing Since 1978, the federal inmates of Canada have had access to a full range of psychiatric care within the penitentiary system. Several psychiatric units are now integrated into the correctional services of Canada. This paper presents the results of a grounded theory doctoral study undertaken in a multilevel secured psychiatric ward within the Canadian federal penitentiary system. The author describes and discusses the results of qualitative data that emerged from his fieldwork. The concept of governmentality, as defined by the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, constitutes one of the major theoretical tools that were helpful in analyzing these data. Police and pastoral power, two dimensions of the security apparatus of governmentality, were found to be useful in understanding and characterizing nursing practice caught between the penal and the psychiatric dispositifs. A Foucauldian perspective allows one to understand the manner in which forensic psychiatric nursing is involved in the governance of mentally ill inmates through three forms of power - sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral - which have posited nursing practice as a strategic tool of the correctional services. This research consists of a study of nursing practice in an extreme setting that deserves a radical analysis.

Canada↗