Can nursing educators learn to trust the world's most trusted profession?

Nursing and nursing education face a paradox whereby the world's most trusted profession seems not to trust its own students and practitioners. Much of nursing education has adopted what has been memorably described as the 'cop shit' approach. This is the panoply of surveillance, anti-plagiarism and proctoring technologies that appear to be used more for policing and punishment of an inherently dishonest student body than to develop ethical and scholarly writing among future peers and colleagues. Nurses in practice may experience similar levels of distrust as they face growing micromanagement and control of both their appearance and nursing practice. We propose that these practices of distrust emerge, not from malice, but rather from the omnipresent neoliberalism and managerialism that engulf almost every aspect of health and university life. Neoliberalism's success has been to reformat academia and practice to the point where such ingrained mistrust has become merely a neutral recognition of 'the real world'. Dismantling nursing and education's 'cop shit' culture and replacing it with the trust and respect that the world's most trusted profession is accorded by wider society will not be easy, but it is vital for the future of nursing.

Will nurse leaders help eradicate 'hair racism' from nursing and health services?

AIMS: Nurse managers play key roles in creating and enforcing organisational hair policies and practices. This challenging paper will provoke discussion, debate and hopefully the dismantling of racist hair policies that disproportionately target black students and nurses. BACKGROUND: Black people have suffered from centuries of hair racism that continues today. Unfortunately, many nurse leaders underestimate the significance of this issue, while perpetuating the injustice. EVALUATION: This paper is based on research literature, media reports and authors' lived experiences regarding hair racism experienced by black people and nurses in particular. KEY ISSUES: Nurse managers often create and police organisational hair policies and dress codes. As health services pledge to eradicate racism 'in principle', ending discriminatory hair policies offers nurse managers a practical way to make this principle a reality. CONCLUSIONS: Hair racism is real and damaging for many black nurses and has no place in a modern health service. Rather than designing and policing such structural racism, nurse managers can be instrumental in ending it. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT: Health service hair policies targeting black nurses especially are not 'neutral'. Nurse managers can challenge this institutional discrimination, demonstrating health services' commitment to ending racism in all of its guises.

Heidegger and parenthood: A theoretical and methodological shift from instrumental to ontological understanding.

Parenthood and parenting are concepts central for child and family health nurses and professionals. They are foundational to numerous nursing philosophies such as 'family-centred care' and 'parent participation'. Yet our understanding of the meaning of being a parent remains difficult to articulate and is often operationalised as collections of assessable techniques and skills. We propose an alternative understanding of parenthood, based on the work of Martin Heidegger and his turn to poetry, that is more ontologically focused on the meaning of being a parent and valuable to nurses seeking to understand or research the existential core of this complex relationship. Alternative ways of understanding parenthood will help nurses grasp the complexities of family relationships they will encounter in practice. Researchers may also frame their investigations and explorations of parenting and parent-child-professional relationships in ways that do not rely exclusively on 'technologies' of parenting skills and techniques. Heidegger's thinking opens up valuable ways of exploring, understanding and researching parenthood that can benefit nurses in clinical practice, education and research. In its ability to challenge the most fundamental of assumptions and to propose challenging alternatives, Heideggerian approaches to understanding the meaning of parenthood can help advance child and family nursing research and practice.