Health care rationing: nursing perspectives

Abstract

Ideas currently postulated around the way health care should be delivered and costs controlled, often referred to as health care rationing, are increasingly coming to dominate the agenda of health care in the 1990s. British nursing has yet to take a noticeably visible role in this debate, despite the fact that it poses a serious dilemma for a profession whose cultural ethos has been shaped by the concepts of universal access and comprehensiveness of care and is wedded to the idea of holism. In the USA debate amongst nurses is further advanced and whilst this discourse may be of limited value to British nursing, owing to a differing historical and cultural attitude to health care, recent changes to the organizational values in the NHS are leading to similar issues arising already faced by American nurses. This paper considers the broad parameters of the debate on health care rationing and examines how these parameters have been reflected within relevant North American and British nursing literature, pointing both to similar and differentiating factors between the two countries.