Nursing documentation and nursing practice: a discourse analysis

Abstract

Nursing documentation exists as a daily reality of nurses' work. It is interpreted by some as the evidence of nursing actions and dismissed by others as a misrepresentation of nursing care. This paper reports on a study of nursing documentation as nursing practice. The work of Foucault and discourse analysis provide a research design for examination of how written descriptions of patient events taken from patient case notes result from hegemonic influences that construct a knowledge and therefore a practice of nursing. Discourses as ways of understanding knowledge as language, social practices and power relations are used to identify how nursing documentation functions as a manifestation and ritual of power relations. A focus on body work and fragmented bodies provided details of nursing's participation in the discursive construction of the object patient and invisible nurse. It is through resistances to documentation that alternative knowledge of nursing exists.