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In this article I discuss the effects on the patient experience of isolation nursing during the CoronaVirus Disease (COVID)-19 pandemic. An unintended consequence of isolation nursing has been to distance patients from nurses and emphasise the technical side of nursing while at the same time reducing the relational or affective potential of nursing. Such distanced forms of nursing normalise the distal patient in hospital. I consider ways in which this new form of distanced nursing has unwittingly contributed to the continued commodification of nursing care in the British NHS. Autoethnography is used to describe and reflect on the illness experience, the experiences of caregivers and the sociocultural organisation of health care. The findings discuss three areas of the illness experience: intimate nursing care; communication; the 'distanced' patient experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinical commissioning groups were set up under the Health & Social Care Act (2012) in England to commission healthcare services for local communities. Governing body nurses provide nursing leadership to commissioning services on clinical commissioning groups. Little is known about how nurses function on clinical commissioning groups. We conducted observations of seven formal meetings, three informal observation sessions and seven interviews from January 2015 to July 2015 in two clinical commissioning groups in the South of England. Implicit in the governing body nurse role is the enduring and contested assumption that nurses embody the values of caring, perception and compassion. This assumption undermines the authority of nurses in multidisciplinary teams where authority is traditionally clinically based. Emerging roles within clinical commissioning groups are not based on clinical expertise, but on well-established new public management concepts which promote governance over clinically-based authority. While governing body nurses claim an authority located in clinical and managerial expertise, this is contested by members of the clinical commissioning group and external stakeholders irrespective of whether it is aligned with clinical knowledge and practice or with new forms of management, as both disregard the type of expertise nurses in commissioning embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how reflective practices enabled researchers to achieve a more complex analysis of qualitative data generated from focus groups. Drawing on our experiences as two white British researchers, conducting a study with internationally educated nurses from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, we consider how our analysis led us to a more nuanced understanding of the data than might have occurred without reflectivity. We identified our respective standpoints, confronted our feared biases, particularly in relation to social stereotyping and prejudice, and located ourselves as co-producers of the data. This enabled us to consider how we might be representing, holding and paralleling, systemic patterns of discrimination, leading to several new insights. Reflective practice is often referred to in theory, less often in application. We hope that sharing our reflective process will benefit other researchers navigating the complex waters of identifying themselves in their research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While poor communication between service users and front-line staff causes many service user complaints in the British National Health Service, staff rarely reflect on the causes of these complaints. We discuss findings from an action research project with midwives which suggest that the midwives struggled to fully understand complaints from women, their partners and families particularly about restricted visiting and the locked door to the midwifery unit. They responded to individual requests to visit out of hours while maintaining the general policy of restricted visiting. In this way, the door was a gatekeeping device which allowed access to the unit within certain rules. The locked door remained a barrier to women and their families and as a result was a common source of informal complaints. We argue that the locked door and restricted visiting to the midwifery unit were forms of gatekeeping and boundary making by midwives which reveals a tension between their espoused woman-centred care and contemporary midwifery practice which is increasingly constrained by institutional values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on the findings of an ethnographic study of fertility nursing in a British fertility unit to explore the relevance and importance of ethnography for illuminating the role of emotions in nursing practice. One of the main findings to emerge from the original study was that infertility was an emotional experience for both staff and patients, and that the organisation of the unit ensured that the potentially disruptive emotions of staff and patients were controlled and remained private. These findings have been reported elsewhere (Allan, 2001, 2002). Drawing on these findings, I discuss the role of ethnography in illuminating the role of emotions in the clinic in two ways. First, I will discuss the nature of the data in ethnography and the relationship between participant observation and interviews. Second, I will discuss the experience of researcher reflexivity and ethnographic authority in ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]