Description

Part of a 6-year revision of Tier 4

Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)in the UK.

This book makes obvious reference to: The Code (2018) Professional Standards of Practice and Behaviour for Nurses, Midwives and Nursing Associates (see www.nmc.org.uk). The Code sets out the professional standards that nurses, midwives and nursing associates must uphold to register for practise in the UK. As stated by the NMC website, the code contains a series of 25 statements that signify what good nursing and midwifery practice looks like and are structured around four themes – 1. prioritise people, 2. practice effectively, 3. preserve safety and 4. promote professionalism and trust. As such, The Code attempts to eliminate any misunderstanding, rebuff rumour and confusion about how to do nursing. This book applies Roland Barthes’ 5-point code (the Hermeutic, the Proairetic, the Semantic, the Symbolic and the Cultural) to analyse how the semantic franchise of The Code works to represent what it is we do as nurses. To question if nursing has a universal structure and how, despite calculable logics professional nursing identity harbours ambiguity in its structuring textuality, coding secrecy, algorithmic efficiency and moral instruction. It uses the office conversations of Wendy and her colleagues to conclude that nursing is more than conduct, it is one constituted by coded representation.

This research like all things is commodity and constructed by connotations and metaphor. To be more specific, it is an auto-ethnography deconstructing ideas we have about cultural symbolism, reproduction and representation of modern 21st century nursing. Wendy is a Staff Nurse caring for mentally ill young people. She attempts to interpret the experience of her subject-positioning and how this is constituted by the forces of the Nursing Franchise™. Through the conversations she has with her two colleagues (Everett and Guy) the reader is introduced to the totalising and ordering world of the franchise and the way it impacts on their personal autonomy. How unwittingly, every nurse reproduces and performs a copy of the representational ideal which, according to Wendy relates to a discretely disguised monopoly allowing little by the way of autonomy but plenty of space on which nurses perform the Crisis of Representation™.

About the Author

Dr Dean-David Holyoake has spent 100 years of his life devoted to the pursuit of nursing and researching in CAMHS (UK) and Europe and will probably continue to do so until his mother tells him to ‘get a grip!’ He lives in Dudley most of the time and occasionally visits Sheffield. He is the author of many books and articles about CAMHS and solution focused living. This book is one of three research ethnographies exploring CAMHS issues and like the others is a play on words and live-method research attempting to explore how the nursing profession presents itself into being, exhibits recognisable aesthetics and as a result backs up against a crisis of (re)presentation.