of nursing if it were assumed that nurses act in protective and professional ways only
because the NMC requires it. It is true that a nurse’s actions are required to be generally
protective but it is also assumed that a nurse should be generally disposed to act in
protective ways. The nurse who is disposed to act in protective ways is to be preferred
to the nurse for whom acting in a professional way requires a conscious decision to act
against inclination. Nevertheless, merely being disposed to act in a protective way is
insufficient to ensure clients are protected from harm. What is required is that these
‘protective’ dispositions are cultivated and more will be said about the development of
‘protective’ dispositions in Chapter 6.
Nurses are vulnerable too!
The discussion thus far has concentrated on what it means to be vulnerable as a
recipient ofhealth care in general and of nursing in particular. From what has been said
it is possible to infer that nurses are somehow less vulnerable than ordinary people; and
elements of the idea that nurses are ‘special’ in the sense of being able to withstand the
sometimes harrowing demands of caring for more-than-ordinarily vulnerable people do
seem to exist in the minds of the general populace. There are those who, once they see
for themselves the sorts of things that nurses are required to do, express their own
inability to do those same things. Of course, this is to generalize from mere anecdote
and in some cases these sentiments may have more to do with a sense of gratitude or a
mistaken idea of what nurses and other health care professionals can achieve, but it does
nevertheless point to a need to say something about nurses and vulnerability.
It should be clear that nurses are ordinarily vulnerable just like everybody else. Indeed
nurses, like all other health care professionals and like all other people, are just as likely
to become patients; and it is not unknown for the experience of being a patient to lead
some individuals to become a nurse.
There is evidence to suggest that nurses are one of a number of occupational groups
who suffer harm as a result of high exposure to particular occupational hazards. For
nurses these hazards include, but are not limited to: back injury (RCN 2002); burnout
(Payne 2001); physical assault, threatening behaviour and verbal abuse (Winstanley and
Whittington 2004); workplace violence (Anderson 2002); HIV and AIDS (Munodawafa
et al. 1993); Hepatitis (Rogers et al. 1998); cytotoxic drugs (Griffin 2003); insufficient
staffing (Humm 2002); substance abuse (West 2002); needlestick injury (Davies et al.
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