PHD, RN, R.PsychN; Faculty, BSN Program, Douglas College
Presenting on: Wednesday October 27
Session Title: “A Two Glass of Wine Shift”: Dominant Discourses and the Social Organization of Nurses’ Substance Use
Session description: Nurses’ problems with substance use can pose serious risks to their health and well-being; yet, we found significant knowledge deficits in the scholarship on this important topic. Existing literature was highly individuated and dominated by abstract concepts and themes that were decontextualized from what we knew to be the actualities of nurses’ work lives and substance-use practices. The ways that nurses talk about their substance-use practices had also remained unexplored. Very few qualitative studies used experiential knowledge of nurses who had substance-use problems as primary data and none had explored how nurses talk about their substance use practices. We undertook an institutional ethnography utilizing the expert knowledge of nurses who had experienced substance-use problems to discover the discourses embedded in the talk among nurses in their everyday work worlds that socially organized their substance-use practices and how those discourses managed these activities.
Learning Objectives:
Research Question 1: What are the discourses embedded in the talk among nurses in their everyday work worlds
that socially organize their substance-use practices?
Research Question 2: How do those discourses manage these activities?
Speaker Biography: Charlotte Ross is a registered nurse, registered psychiatric nurse, nurse researcher and nurse educator at Douglas College in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Her clinical background and teaching activities are in mental health and substance use. Her research areas include nurses’ health, mental health, and substance use.