Nursing as a Macintyrean practice
Defining nursing
I have already suggested that, because of the variety of situations in which nursing takes
place, defining nursing is not easy. It would appear most people assume that they know
both what a nurse is and what a nurse does. For some time the public perception of
nurses has been a matter of professional concern to nurses themselves, particularly as
many who portray nurses tend to resort to certain well known stereotypes. The nurse as
the selfless angel; the nurse as the smouldering sex symbol; the nurse as the
handmaiden of the doctor; and so on. These generalised images seem to resist attempts
to provide a more realistic picture of nursing. Nevertheless, and despite the
acknowledged power of these types of images, nurses and nursing continue to enjoy a
high level of public trust and regard.
However, the scope of nursing practice is vast and in general terms it is to be supposed
that most people would think of a nurse as someone who tends the sick and (as a social
worker colleague was heard to say) as someone who gives injections. Further it is to be
supposed that most people would think first of all that the activity of nursing takes place
in a hospital setting but might then concede that it sometimes occurs outside of
institutional buildings: in the community and in the homes of those who are in some
sense ill. If my suggestion that this is the generally and most commonly held perception
of nurses and nursing then we have a problem not least because the work of many
nurses would not be covered in the ideas expressed above.
The range and scope of nursing
It would be to trivialise attempts to define nursing to say that nursing is what nurses do.
Nevertheless there is a sense in which it is true because the range of activity of those
who can legitimately call themselves registered nurses3 extends far beyond the range
suggested in the paragraph above. Apart from the four separate branches of nursing
(adult nursing; children’s nursing; learning disability nursing; and mental health
nursing) there are numerous examples of nurses working in diverse and not immediately
obvious nursing roles. This breadth of activity in which nurses engage challenges any
simple definition of nursing. Perhaps the most enduring and most often quoted
definition of nursing is:
3 In the UK the term registered nurse is protected in law and can be used only by someone whose name
appears on the register of nursing practitioners held by the NMC
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